Scatter tools

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mirkoj
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Re: Scatter tools

Post by mirkoj » 29 Feb 2012, 15:12

Heya, I was just wondering...
I've got couple different rocks in one group. They are different in shape and in texture.
But after applying that group as instance source all rocks in there share one material.
Any ideas if it is possible to just use all these with their materials scattered around or need to create different pointcloud for each type?
Thanks

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gustavoeb
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Re: Scatter tools

Post by gustavoeb » 29 Feb 2012, 15:20

not in front of SI right now (sorry), but, you could use a Switch node in the render tree and drive it with some sort of shape ID or something...

then connect the different materials to the switch node
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mirkoj
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Re: Scatter tools

Post by mirkoj » 29 Feb 2012, 15:27

argh found it. needed to change number of objects in group in m_simple)scatter node :) it was reading only 1st object. my bad.
I;ve forgot about that, now watched again that small qtime video tutor.
Would be great to have that video on vimeo as well ;)

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Re: Scatter tools

Post by milanvasek » 29 Feb 2012, 17:12

mirkoj wrote:argh found it. needed to change number of objects in group in m_simple)scatter node :) it was reading only 1st object. my bad.
I;ve forgot about that, now watched again that small qtime video tutor.
Would be great to have that video on vimeo as well ;)
that old video is recorded with some codec that vimeo wont accept...
well, i will put the new version of scattertools here soon and make some basic videos as well.
but i'm afraid the toolbar won't be 100% working, because i don't have enough time to learn python :)
Milan Vasek
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mirkoj
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Re: Scatter tools

Post by mirkoj » 29 Feb 2012, 17:29

Nice. Well honestly I guess it is better for people to get used to ICE from start.
More freedom and also ICE is there to stay, and staying away from ICE in Softimage would be same as skipping to learn Scene explorer :)
I'm not in ICE as much as I would love to but it is still simple in enough to get all important stuff.
Thanks again for amazing compound, I've just got some time to play with it for something and LOVING it!

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Re: Scatter tools

Post by milanvasek » 29 Feb 2012, 17:56

mirkoj wrote:Nice. Well honestly I guess it is better for people to get used to ICE from start.
More freedom and also ICE is there to stay, and staying away from ICE in Softimage would be same as skipping to learn Scene explorer :)
I'm not in ICE as much as I would love to but it is still simple in enough to get all important stuff.
Thanks again for amazing compound, I've just got some time to play with it for something and LOVING it!
I agree, I love ICE and connecting nodes... reason I started making toolbar was to speed up basic setup only (click one button instead of Get empty pointcloud - create ICE tree - create nodes - drag&drop geometry - connect all those nodes...) Then i thought it would be nice to have more buttons and I tried to make them, but realized, that it gets quite complex and it would be impossible to make it without python knowledge :) it's a shame because i would like to give people 100% working tools. well, maybe there will be someone to finish it and share it later :)
Milan Vasek
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Re: Scatter tools

Post by milanvasek » 01 Mar 2012, 19:49

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)
Milan Vasek
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Memag
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Re: Scatter tools

Post by Memag » 01 Mar 2012, 19:58

Thank you Milan.

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diissar
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Re: Scatter tools

Post by diissar » 01 Mar 2012, 22:08

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

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Re: Scatter tools

Post by milanvasek » 17 Mar 2012, 13:17



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 :)
Milan Vasek
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mirkoj
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Re: Scatter tools

Post by mirkoj » 24 Jan 2013, 21:00

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

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Re: Scatter tools

Post by milanvasek » 24 Jan 2013, 21:35

mirkoj wrote: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...
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Re: Scatter tools

Post by mirkoj » 24 Jan 2013, 23:32

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!

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Re: Scatter tools

Post by mirkoj » 11 Mar 2013, 18:46

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

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Re: Scatter tools

Post by El Burritoh » 24 Sep 2015, 23:58

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...

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Offset by Displacement.xsicompound
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julius
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Re: Scatter tools

Post by julius » 25 Sep 2015, 09:28

Thanks a lot ! very usefull !

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

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