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Grass LOD
Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 12:48 pm
by jc4d
Hi all,
Sorry if this question was covered already.
Is there a way to see the grass LOD in the viewport?, if not this could be considered as a wish for future updates.
Cheers
JC
Re: Grass LOD
Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 3:27 pm
by JDHill
Currently, no, but if I add that, which camera do you think it should use? It could use whichever camera happens to be the current render view, or it could use active viewport's view, or I could put an explicit camera link in the grass tag, similar to how there is a Scene link.
Re: Grass LOD
Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 4:16 pm
by jc4d
I don“t know if linking the camera could be more messy if you have many grass tags into the same mesh (but not bad idea if the programing give less problems), for me the smoothest workflow could be to generate the grass from the active camera/current view, if you change the camera then you have to release and generate again the grass.
Cheers
JC
Re: Grass LOD
Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 4:33 pm
by JDHill
Yes, definitely you would need to regenerate it if you switched cameras, since that is a pretty expensive operation. Anyway, thanks, I'll see what I can do. Maybe it will make sense to a) if there is a Scene link, use the camera that would be exported for that Scene Object, and if not then b1) if there is a render camera, use that, or b2) use the active viewport view.
Re: Grass LOD
Posted: Fri Mar 15, 2013 3:36 am
by eric nixon
I would prefer to create an explicit link to a camera when generating grass by default. Only in complex scenes would you need an auto detail per active camera. its a cpu hog to have that going on by default..
Doing some heavy work at the moment JD, plugin is extremely robust, almost impossible to break, many thanks

Re: Grass LOD
Posted: Fri Mar 15, 2013 3:46 am
by JDHill
I'm glad to hear that. On dynamic update, definitely that is not in the cards, since to generate the viewport representation literally entails doing a full export of all affected geometry, just so that the grass extension can get a look at it and tell me what it's going to do at render time. And I am also tending toward the explicit camera link, mostly because it is not easy to know exactly which camera is going to be used at any time without it.