"clearcut" artifact in rendering trees at higher densities

  • I have encountered (and a number of other people have noticed) a phenomenon I am calling the "clearcut" artifact.

    When cultivating trees in large forested areas you sometime see a linear swath where no trees were cultivated despite

    the fact that that area is within a landuse="forest" feature.

    I was not sure if this was a scenProc or AFS2 issue so I contrived some simple test cases.

    I defined a 0.1x0.1 degree tile in the middle of a lake with a single landuse="forest" featue for ease of evaluating the results.

    Cultivating with 0.0001 separation and maximum randomness yields 938,000 trees in the first example.

    This gives an even distribution as one would expect. (the far corner is haze obscured not truncated)

    with 0.00009 spacing we get 1,164,000 trees and clearcut artifacts appear

    and with 0.00008 spacing we get 1,474,000 trees

    It is clear that the problem gets worse with the number of trees but still not not distinguish between a scenProc issue or an AFS2 issue.

    Cultivating at 0.0001 separation a second time and loading both TOC files (1,800,000 trees) the artifacts appear


    And at 0.00009 two TOC files (2,328,000 trees) the artifacts are worse than a single 0.00009 TOC

    Since both TOC files will render correctly on their own, but show artifacts when loaded together, it seems

    the the issue is in AFS2 management of plant_list entries. The cases with clearcut artifacts have multiple

    WARNING: more than 20480 trees planted

    entries in the log.

    Can IPACs explain the rational for the 20480 limit and the resulting rendering behaviour?

    thanks

    /Stu

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