distributing original meshes from pointcloud instances

[seb4d]

Hi !
I know this great compound "Create Polygon Meshes from Instance Shapes". For the moment I can't make it work correctly as I don't really understand the ICE materials thing.
Anyway, what this compound does is creating a unique new mesh.
What I am looking for is something that would duplicate the instanced mesh masters and place them as they are in the pointcloud. I don't want a new mesh, I just want to use the original meshes. I could do it by hand but it would take a week

[Pancho]

I spent my time with the same proiblem yesterday. The compound, also it might work, is horrible to use. That's probably NOT the author's responsibility, but the way ICE works.

I created a chain with instances, but needed to export it as one mesh. Creating the topology was easy, but getting the UVs right did cost me hours of finding the mistakes.

I did only have one instance and then used the chain generator to distribute it properly.

I then created an empty mesh and created an ICE tree in the modeling stack.

Create copies from polygon mesh.

Source is my single chain element, point cloud name the name of the chain generator point cloud. Don't forget the copy texture projection from source. plug it into the execute on copy port.

Hopefully that helps you too.

IN order to export the mesh you need to freeze/bake the uvs onto it. There is a script out there which does that (bake ice uv something).

Cheers
Pancho

[Chris_TC]

This script converts your instance point cloud into geometry. It generates duplicates of the instance master at the right SRT settings:
Pointcloud deInstance (find it on rray.de)

If I remember correctly, it won't duplicate a hierarchy. And it needs a bunch of attributes to exist on your ICE tree (such as orientation).

[seb4d]

Thanks Chris_TC, I know this script and tried to use it. It works ok, a bit slow, but it doesn't use the right master objects as in the pointcloud.
My pointcloud has a randomized value in the instanced shape index (20 different cubes with different textures), but the script uses only a few of them...