Scatter tools

[milanvasek]

sooo, here you can download Scatter Tools v1.1 http://milanvasek.com/_scattertools/Sca ... 1.xsiaddon
packed as .xsiaddon so installation should be really easy.
i removed some buttons from toolbar, because it was too complicated for me to make it work properly (i included also the other version of toolbar that is not working very well, in case someone wants to improve it) i recommend using toolbar only for basic setup and then just work inside ICE. all compounds are there...
as i said before, workflow should be now much clearer. just scatter something and then modify it's size, shape, color. if you need to modify something only in certain areas (that will be most of the time) use those Execute.. nodes... (all compounds are inside tools/scatter tools)



here is the video again:


i will make some more probably.

and again my thanks to Anto Matkovic for help with Execute in/out curve, Andreas Byström for allowing me to include his cool abScatter compound and Atsushi Tsugaruya for his Chain generator (used in Scatter On Curve compound)

[Memag]

Thank you Milan.

[diissar]

Thanks a lot Milan!Im going to try it right now

[milanvasek]

short video where i'm trying to show why is it important to create that ShapeID parametr on the nulls when using ScatterOnNulls compound and also showing one possible way to place instances in your scene

[mirkoj]

hello!
I have an small problem with scatter tools. Actually with rendering
I just sent an scene to render on farm and to check it out I saw that trees my case are created differently or every frame, rendering rame by frame over small farm.
Now I probably missed it somewhere but is there way to just freeze position or something so it can scatter objects and then render them on same location on that geo for every frame and on every comp rendering?
other than that GREAT tool! thank you for creating it!
thanks

[milanvasek]

hello!
I have an small problem with scatter tools. Actually with rendering
I just sent an scene to render on farm and to check it out I saw that trees my case are created differently or every frame, rendering rame by frame over small farm.
Now I probably missed it somewhere but is there way to just freeze position or something so it can scatter objects and then render them on same location on that geo for every frame and on every comp rendering?
other than that GREAT tool! thank you for creating it!
thanks

hi. there are 2 possible reasons i can think of right now...
1. if your mesh is deformed, you have to use ab_scatter and not just simple scatter for objects to stay in the same place (and two input meshes for abscatter, one static and the other one deformed)
2. if you are using simple scatter on not deformed object, go inside the compound and check Generate sample set node and its Time varying checkbox. it should be turned off, but it's possible it was not...

hope it's one of these things

well, if it's only happening in rendering on farm but it's ok while playing animation, then i guess you can cache the pointcloud or freeze it...

[mirkoj]

it was shape jitter I added
But I had weight map on globe so that only ocean parts are jittering a bit and continents are not moving but I had scattered trees turned off so didn;t see that they are flickering position ntil test rendering couple frames. Should be fine now.
duplicated geometry without shape jitter works fine for now till I check out ab_scatter.
Thanks!

[mirkoj]

again me on scatter topic
is there a way to randomly offset animation of instanced object?
example:
animated tree moving a bit on the wind, simple low poly tree with 2 bones for example, animation in loop and then just give random animation offset to each scattered instance?
Tried looking on help but couple options that I saw there just didn't work, probably missing something...
Thanks

[El Burritoh]

I want to thank Milan for this toolset. I use it all the time. One of the things I have not seen in public scatter systems is a way to ensure that particle positions respect displacement. I am an ICE noobie, but this one wasn't all that hard to pull off. In this case I'm using Redshift, but I'm sure the same concept could be applied to any renderer. I'm attaching the compound ("Offset by Displacement") here if anyone is interested. The only tricky thing is to make sure your values match between the ICE tree and the displacement shader. All I'm doing here is to 'displace' the pointcloud by the same amount as the surface, so I have to set the same values in multiple places. Expressions and param linking streamline this well enough.

Apologies if something like this has already been shared out there somewhere...

[julius]

Thanks a lot ! very usefull !

And Mirkoj, did you find a solution for your random animation offset ?

[mirkoj]

unfortunately no
but the again I'm really not so good in ICE there is probably someone that can take care of that

[druitre]

(...)The only tricky thing is to make sure your values match between the ICE tree and the displacement shader. (...)
]

Oh Tim, that is very cool. But have you found a way to get 'fractal scalar' node values into ICE? I have this landscape scene, driven by fractal scalars, and I had to render out a depth map from topview to get something into ICE. But I suspect it should be possible to do it directly...

cheers,
Jasper

[El Burritoh]

Good question, Jasper.... I don't really know. The Shader Tree and ICE being so separate from each other.... Sounds like a question for Paul Smith!

[FXDude]

Indeed being able to have things scattered on surfaces displaced at render-time can be invaluable,
(avoiding needing to have very large amounts of terrain geometry and keeping higher-level shape control)

Thanks so much for this!


XSI Scattering tools (mostly user created) is also another area where Soft can really shine.
(X-Gen is supposedly quite convoluted and quickly becoming very slow)

[Pooby]

You can't have ICE reading displacement values, but you can have the displacement reading ICE values so I'd do it like that if you want hem to be the same.
Good idea actually. I'd not thought of doing that before. I always have just matched them separately.

[El Burritoh]

So in the case of a fractal, you're saying you'd source it all from a fractal in ICE, and push that out to scalar/color attributes for the shader tree?