Randomize Instances Seed

[sant0s]

Hey

Im playing with milanvasek's scatter tools (thx btw, super duper!) and was thinking, if it is possible to randomize the seed of geometry while setting them as a instance.

I'll try to explain what I mean.

Created 4 different kinda rocks and used some randomizing to get nice surfaces and different shapes.

I did not freeze them, so there still is the active ICE tree.

With the scatter tools I used them as instances and created a landscape with 100 rocks.

And so the question is, if the seed could be randomized on this 100 rock instances to get 100 different ones?

Greetings and thanks for help,
sant0s

[Hirazi Blue]

I quite probably misinterpret your question - if so: sorry -
but couldn't you achieve this (or at least fake it) with the included "m_Clone_and_randomize" compound?

[sant0s]

Hi Hirazi

I was testing this compound, but think it is for randomizing the positions, not the topology itself.
Found this thread here: viewtopic.php?f=27&t=334 and think, the only way is real copies instead of instances.
On the first site at bottom is a screen, how the author made some randome deforms - testing that, but still did not figur out if he added a second ICE tree to the sphere_copies or whatever.

actualy im getting so angry with myself - feel so damn stupid coz nothing works atm! ^^

[Hirazi Blue]

But isn't the combination of the m_Simple_Scatter and the m_Clone_and_randomize compound already doing the trick?
I probably still do not get it...

edit: After reading the next post, I hastily removed the silly image on account of it being wrong!

[milanvasek]

well, if i understand correctly what you want to do i think its not possible. you can get some variety with shaders (using values from particles/instances in render tree, for example in displacement) but geometry itself must be created before scattering.
but who knows, maybe there is some way that i don't know about

[sant0s]

Hi,

yea, I think so too after sucking google out of information. So will try out the Polymesh Duplicator and hopefully my fps dont crash ^^

Because with your compound i could just set up tons of rocks an still move around. btw, if i have for example 100 spheres in a scene, is it the same amount of poliys if i have 1 sphere an 99 instances?

I think i should test displacement, hope that 3Delight gets some good results. With MR it needs "some" time, specially with such a huge amount of shapes i think

Thanks for you answers!

[milanvasek]

if i have for example 100 spheres in a scene, is it the same amount of poliys if i have 1 sphere an 99 instances?

well, for display purposes it will be quite the same i guess but its much better for rendering of course to have instances.
also, great thing about using ICE for instancing is that you can display them as boxes, spheres or whatever or display only few percent of them.
also what i found quite useful is to make a simple compound to switch between two groups of objects (for example hires trees and very low res trees) in case that u need more precise display shape than just a box, but your hires meshes are too heavy

[Tekano]

hey guys, at first I was like no, you have no way to pass data to instanced ICE trees - they don't exist on the instances, but then I had vague recollections of Guillaume Laforge's Weblog copy operators and recon you could cobble what you want together with this. but instead of thinking on manipulating a small amount of instances and controlling them to get your range , just generate one rock and with this custom operator you have access to a different seed , or custom attribute for each particles 'copy' instance.

http://frenchdog.wordpress.com/2009/10/ ... softimage/
as the french would say.. et voilà!

bear in mind I have not made this work in your particular case (yet, but may a have a go if you get stuck) , but have used this custom op before and it does work pretty great but wasn't clever enough to have a use for it at the time. there may even be something better already possible with the new topology tools

*edit* ah when I said I used it - I actually meant Nassosy's polygon duplicator.. essentially the same thing. oops!
https://www.si-community.com/forum/viewt ... f=27&t=334

[guillaume]

For info, in Softimage 2012, you don't need to use any custom operators to do some polymesh copies.
Also you will find some compounds in the Topology task if you need to copy attributes of your source mesh.

You can find more info in the doc here : http://download.autodesk.com/global/doc ... d28e297340

And for the Shape Instance scenario you can use this compound : viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1579

[sant0s]

thx for the info, looks interesting, but not that easy, too - never worked with the new modeling nodes.

need the weekend to understand this i guess ^^

[Chris_TC]

thx for the info, looks interesting, but not that easy, too - never worked with the new modeling nodes.

This might be of some use to you. But note that I put it together very quickly on request, and some of the logic I used is not ideal. One day I will find the time to go over all my compounds, clean them up and post them in a thread. One day...

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1593

[sant0s]

oh, cool. i have your compound, but did not realized that it could work together with ms_scater tools. Gonna play some dod:source now and after that ill test it
thank you!