Reality Factory

If you have one staticmesh that is small enough it does nt need to be split in smaller parts,
and want to add another static mesh at the same place for grass,should the grass polygons never toutch the ground polygons below?

The foliage must be another thing,since it doesnt have this kind of restriction but it always faces the camera view and i cant use it.

So,if i add the vegetation and tree leaves as a separate staticmesh,should the grasses be wherever there are flat polygon quads so the grasses wont seem to float?
I mean it is easier to align the grass to a flat ground than rotate them.

And a last:The grass sheets of the staticmesh i think should not intersect,but just rotate a little so one covers the other from a different angle,is that correct?

I am making one mesh for the ground,one for the transparent ones like grasses and one for the stones,trees,
so i can use lod.
(The terrain border is lower res at both base and Lod actors-,can t notice it because you can not get close to the border due to an invisible barrier,and as all the detail is at the center,when you move away from the center the Lod verson hase the same detail at the outer parts but less detail at the center-at least the cpu is freed from the details).

The grasses do not seem to find any horizontally flat surface (its all small mounts since the terrain is small and can have smaller polygons)
,so i think i will boolean subtract them to the terrain,and delete the intersecting parts.

I hope that a mesh with transparent smoke-textured patches (flipbook of animated clouds) which i have as ground fog,wont interfere with the grasses transparency.
I have prepared these patches and placed each to a slight different height very close to the ground( like layered fog) and it intersects the grasses,flowers etc.I will see.

Finally the grasses receive to much stencil shadows and look funny,i wont use transparent grasses.
Mesh grass bundles of around 80 faces look better.

As for the fog sheets, i can not use that,because it clips other transparent polygons in the way and shade the ground beneath -not to mention the stencil shadows that float on this smoke-I had totally forgot that the s. shadows appear on any polygon part -including the transparent pixels.

I got the .tga grasses staticmeh to finally work.It just needed more careful placement so the grass faces wont intersect the ground or anything else.
I rotated and vertex edited each single grass element before attaching them to one single object,and then exported the vegetation.

Since the area is small (1024x1024) i placed transparent tree and bushes sprites outside this area,(for optimization)-since you cant get too close to these flat sprite polygons because of a fence,and see that they re fake.

Now,when i look at the sheet trees through the transparent fence the trees are nt clipped-at least its not noticeable.

I will get rid of the grasses that get in the way of the players shadow.

This way the ground will look more bare,but at least it will be bug free as possible.
I can still add other stuff instead of the transparent grass,like stones, skulls,bones.

Some things i have noticed about staticmeshes ,Static entity proxies ,transparent textures and framerate are:

Advantages:

Static Entity Proxy with no transparent textures can freely intersect clip and solid brushes.
Static Entity Proxy (no collision) with clip brushes:Much Faster than staticmesh.


Bugs:
1.Staticmesh triangles are clipped by the skydome as the camera rotates.
-Conclusion:Staticmeh and skydome are nt compatible enough-.
2.(Skydome anyway drops the framerate because it needs high resolution (tesselation)).

3.Staticmeh must not intersect with clip or solid brushes collision brushes because most of its surface gets clipped,
even when the staticmesh does not use transparent textures.
If you need collision use the bounding box-although the staticmesh b. box is still buggy and you might get stuck on it).

4.Several Static Entity Proxies that their origin has a great distance difference with each other
dont get the same amount of light,and there might be a difference-
some might be brighter and some darker.

5.All transparent textured actor faces should not intersect anything.

6.Transparent textured faces receive stencil shadows also to the transparent areas.

So,you can use transparent textures as far as no stencil shadows reaches them.
(some might still use bitmap shadows along transparent leaves textures in simple cartoon games).