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"C.Place" one of many current truePlace WIPS
About Truespace Archives
These pages are a copy of the official truespace forums prior to their removal somewhere around 2011.
They are retained here for archive purposes only.
"C.Place" one of many current truePlace WIPS // Work in Progress
Post by 3dvisuals dude // Apr 16, 2007, 12:37am
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3dvisuals dude
Total Posts: 1703
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Hi folks,
I've been very busy building truePlace-type structures, one of which I'd like to discuss with you here. It raises practicality issues and questions I hope some of you may be willing to assist me with.
In this particular project, I would like to utilize gemstones as the building materials, in this case solid amethyst columns and an overhead latticework comprised of a lilac shaded sapphire and plain glass slats.
I realize that realtime reflections are a thing not yet attained in trueSpaces, but I wonder about refraction in transparencies such as the materials I wish to use. Obviously, glass is currently being used within truePlaces, but has anyone attempted yet to utilize refraction within these spaces?
Also, it appears that shadows are baked into the textures within truePlaces. Are there any plans in the works that anyone is aware of to improve the quality of these shadows? I have a 256 Meg Radeon card, maybe it's just my setup, but there appears to be an awful lot of jaggedness in these shadows online, so I'm naturally curious.
Critiques are welcomed on this project, I bow to your experience being an absolute newbie with this type of construction.
Thanks in advance for whatever help you may be able to give me,
- 3dvisuals dude |
Post by TomG // Apr 16, 2007, 3:13am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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Hi,
Real-time glass and metal (reflection) shaders have been developed by David Bokon - you can see some examples in the recent newsletter (http://www.caligari.com/news/news_april2007/CPCP_200704.html#DavidBokon). Shaders that work in trueSpace will work in truePlay, since they use the same real-time renderer.
Shadows are NOT baked in truePlace. All shadows are calculated in real-time. Note that quality is controlled both by the software, and by the graphics card the end user has.
For truePlace, the shadow quality is NOT set very high. If it was, those with older graphics cards would begin to see a big performance hit and the spaces would slow to a crawl. In order to keep the spaces accessible to all, the shadow quality is not ramped up to the max.
However the shadow quality should be very good in truePlace. You might want to post a screengrab to show what you are seeing, as graphics cards can make a difference (what card are you running on btw, you give the ram and general make, but not the specific model?). There seem to be driver issues right now with either Vista or the 8800, as two users (myself being one of them) see degraded shadow quality with the combination of Vista and an 8800 card. It's not known if it is the Vista part of the 8800 part that is the problem! Anyway, the shadows there come out quite blocky unless very high shadowmaps are used (2048 and higher), which is too high to use in shared spaces like truePlace as it would really slow it down for everyone else.
Some ATI laptop cards are also known to have a driver / display issue and show lower quality than would be expected. You may be experiencing this ATI driver issue, since you have an ATI card.
This is naturally the problem with PC configurations and is the bane of graphics applications like games - each set-up is different and behaves a little differently.
BTW under Player Hardware Settings, the bottom option (Shadow Filtering Quality) may help you improve the look of your shadows. Some other settings there might help too, but they could cause a performance hit - try them out and see.
HTH!
Tom |
Post by 3dvisuals dude // Apr 16, 2007, 2:08pm
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3dvisuals dude
Total Posts: 1703
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Hi Tom, and thanks for taking the time to explain all that to me, it helps me a lot!
First off, the card I am now using is an ATI Radeon 9550 256MB DDR AGP which I have running on an AMD Athlon XP 1500+ 1.36Ghz Gigabyte System Board with 1 Gig of ram under Win XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c, Truespace6.6 and TruePlay 1.21. (Not a great system, but the best I can afford at the moment.)
I appreciate that shader link and I'll be exploring that later today. I will also do a screengrab of the shadow jaggies I referred to above and post it here later tonight, the most noticable place they showed up was on top of some of the gallery images posted on walls, where the ceiling struts cast diagonal lines across the images which look more like stairs than lines.
As you pointed out though, it may well be my rendering settings in truePlay itself, which I hadn't even considered. I'll check that later today as well and thanks for that tip.
Regarding Caligari's choice to NOT set the shadow quality too high for the sake of lower-end graphics card users, I respect and appreciate that decision and can live with the jaggies if that's the price. We ALL need more users in truePlaces - MANY more users - so I'm willing to pay a price for that myself in performance if need be. I'll check my settings and drivers too though in the meantime, as you say all systems are different.
Anyhow, I will post a screengrab here later today/tonight just to clarify what I'm experiencing... it's not THAT bad, just not ideal.
I'm glad to hear that truePlaces utilize the same realtime renderer as trueSpace, I never heard that before and assumed it would be different.
By the way, seeing as how I'm an old Marketing guy myself (former CEO of a Scottsdale AZ Marketing Consulting Firm), I wonder if there's anything WE customers can help you do to specifically promote truePlaces and the truePlace concept for potential new hosts. I'm sure many of us would be willing to help out if we all knew simple and clear ways to do so. I have my own related ideas and plans I'll be pursuing after I get TS7.5, of course, but I'm sure lots of people here would appreciate an opportunity to help disseminate truePlay to a wider audience and possible new customers.
Oh... btw, what does "HTH" stand for? (I think of Hit The Highway!);)
Thanks again sincerely for all the help,
- 3dvisuals dude |
Post by 3dvisuals dude // Apr 16, 2007, 2:55pm
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3dvisuals dude
Total Posts: 1703
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Hi again Tom,
I Just visited the Renderosity truePlace Gallery... GREAT idea, truly GREAT!!! I'm sorry I missed the main event (had to catch up on desperately-needed sleep at the time, but will drop in there occasionally in hopes of meeting the Artist and perhaps some new truePlace explorers! Well done!
Here's a screengrab I made and post-composited to show my truePlay 1.21 settings, maybe you'll spot something here I may have missed.
Thanks for all the help!
-3dvisuals dude |
Post by Nez // Apr 16, 2007, 10:12pm
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Nez
Total Posts: 1102
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HTH = hope that helps, AFAIK! |
Post by TomG // Apr 17, 2007, 3:00am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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HTH is indeed hope this helps :)
Yes, those shadows are not displaying properly. Every so often some cards run into problems like these - my 7600GS card displays the shadows great, my 8000GTS does not.
I'll forward this along in relation to the shadows - they should have blending at the edges, and much smaller "squares" so they would look much smoother. For now I would recommend the bottom setting on the panel, try setting 3x3 blend or just 3x3 and see if that helps.
For promotional stuff, users can always help. If you know of a place where people would enjoy truePlay (or trueSpace) then be sure to tell them about it and what you think of it. "Word of mouth" is always useful - people want to hear from other real people, and not just marketing-speak from the company. Also, word of mouth can reach people who might not otherwise hear about truePlay.
So if you know of an email list, forum, user group, whatever, where people would be interested in this stuff, then do tell them what you think about it, let them know it is out there. I am NOT saying head off to every board you can think of and post some spam of course. Be sure your intentions are genuine - don't go signing up on a board, post a spam message, then never log in again, that isn't what I mean here.
If however you are a member of a group of digital artists say, and you think the Work In Progress gallery is some place they'd enjoy sharing their work and discussing it with each other live rather than on the forum you currently use, well let your friends there know about this option.
Just be genuine! Genuine word of mouth is useful, we would like more people to hear about truePlace, so that would be great if more people knew it was there. Maybe you have friends you only talk with online, and it could be fun to meet in truePlace rather than in an instant messenger for instance, and you could suggest that.
And so on. So, no spam campaign, but a genuine spreading of the information about truePlace would always be useful. truePlace is there for people to use, so do make sure people know it is there for them to take advantage of!
HTH! ;)
Tom |
Post by frootee // Apr 17, 2007, 3:42am
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frootee
Total Posts: 2667
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question:
Is it possible to configure the trueplace application such that the real time render quality is more dependent upon the user's system capabilities? That would solve the issue with jaggy shadows in the shared environment. |
Post by TomG // Apr 17, 2007, 7:11am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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Each light contains the size of its own shadow map. You can override shadow map sizes using the panel mentioned below, but only to increase the sampling it uses to smooth it out, not to control the shadow map size.
Since truePlay cannot edit objects, it can't edit the light's shadow map. Yet the light needs to own its own shadow map for the author to have control over the quality of the scene (which is important too).
The jagged issue here is something else though, an actual driver problem. The shadow map that is set would and should give much smoother results than this - so the current set up actually is working well, the issue we are seeing here is the driver failing to render what is meant to be there :)
HTH!
Tom |
Post by 3dvisuals dude // Apr 17, 2007, 8:23pm
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3dvisuals dude
Total Posts: 1703
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HTH is indeed hope this helps :)
Yes, those shadows are not displaying properly. Every so often some cards run into problems like these - my 7600GS card displays the shadows great, my 8000GTS does not.
I'll forward this along in relation to the shadows - they should have blending at the edges, and much smaller "squares" so they would look much smoother. For now I would recommend the bottom setting on the panel, try setting 3x3 blend or just 3x3 and see if that helps.
Thanks Tom,
I'll check the 3x3 blend and 3x3 settings and I appreciate the tip, but even if it doesn't do the job for my particular card I won't let that stand in the way of my enjoyment of truePlaces... I'm really enjoying them and especially the future potential they represent to all of us trueSpace designers.
Thanks also for sharing your ideas about truePlace promotion, the more we all think about it the more we are all likely to help promote it within our own circles. Any encouraging promotion is good promotion, provided, as you said, it falls well short of being spam. Hopefully a few more people will think about it now and the more the merrier!
Thanks again,
-3dvisuals dude |
Post by 3dvisuals dude // Apr 17, 2007, 8:25pm
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3dvisuals dude
Total Posts: 1703
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question:
Is it possible to configure the trueplace application such that the real time render quality is more dependent upon the user's system capabilities? That would solve the issue with jaggy shadows in the shared environment.
Hey Frootee... glad to see you back!
Howz the move from NH? Good I hope! :D
-3dvisuals dude |
Post by TomG // Apr 19, 2007, 5:18am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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Just checking in here - the issue is not driver related, but hardware related. Unfortunately your ATI 9550 card is not capable of supporting more than a single sample shadow, which is why you get this blocky look.
Since the hardware cannot support more sampling in the shadows, the software has no way of smoothing it out any more than what you see currently. The only solution would be to update to a more powerful card, sorry to tell you.
HTH!
Tom |
Post by 3dvisuals dude // Apr 19, 2007, 6:20pm
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3dvisuals dude
Total Posts: 1703
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Just checking in here - the issue is not driver related, but hardware related. Unfortunately your ATI 9550 card is not capable of supporting more than a single sample shadow, which is why you get this blocky look.
Since the hardware cannot support more sampling in the shadows, the software has no way of smoothing it out any more than what you see currently. The only solution would be to update to a more powerful card, sorry to tell you.
HTH!
Tom
Hi again Tom,
Thanks for going to all that trouble, at least now we all know that it's these 9550 cards which are the culprit. I can live with the blocky shadows then for a while... no sweat. I'll be investing in TS7.5 as soon as my tight budget permits, and that is a definite priority OVER a new graphics card! ;)
Thanks for all the help!
-3dvisuals dude |
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