any more detail on what vraypattern is actually doing?
Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2011 12:00 am
There has been limited info as to exactly what vraypattern is doing "under the hood"
Of course you want to protect what is obviously a very clever bit of code, but im not after the source code or anything, but a better description of how it differs from scattered proxies in terms of geometry handling, how it is related to the displacement system (its hard to picture it being based on the displacement system.. it seems to do a very different thing) also comments like "its good where high accuracy isnt needed" or "its not good for trees, better for things like grass" id like to know more of why.. does it prefer low poly source meshes? what are the accuracy issues? is it better to have a large tile and few repetitions or a small tile and lots of repetitions?
is there scope in the future to support things like varying scale/rotation etc over the tiled surface? or is it inherently impossible..?
also, things like... does it deform the source mesh over the target mesh, or tile them without distortion, aligned to the normals below.. also.. can the tiles overlap? what limitations are there on modifying the vraypattern? can we give an overall texture to it? apply uvw mapping etc? can we mix the original materials with overall ones?
at the moment it seems a little like witchcraft, rendering unlimited polygons without using very much memory... how does it differ from instanced geometry?
knowing more about how it works would definitely help deciding whether its really useful for my workflow...
Of course you want to protect what is obviously a very clever bit of code, but im not after the source code or anything, but a better description of how it differs from scattered proxies in terms of geometry handling, how it is related to the displacement system (its hard to picture it being based on the displacement system.. it seems to do a very different thing) also comments like "its good where high accuracy isnt needed" or "its not good for trees, better for things like grass" id like to know more of why.. does it prefer low poly source meshes? what are the accuracy issues? is it better to have a large tile and few repetitions or a small tile and lots of repetitions?
is there scope in the future to support things like varying scale/rotation etc over the tiled surface? or is it inherently impossible..?
also, things like... does it deform the source mesh over the target mesh, or tile them without distortion, aligned to the normals below.. also.. can the tiles overlap? what limitations are there on modifying the vraypattern? can we give an overall texture to it? apply uvw mapping etc? can we mix the original materials with overall ones?
at the moment it seems a little like witchcraft, rendering unlimited polygons without using very much memory... how does it differ from instanced geometry?
knowing more about how it works would definitely help deciding whether its really useful for my workflow...