For a set of desireable features, you might want to look at something like http://www.multiscatter.com/ for inspiration.
It´s for 3ds Max but my point would be that from reading through it´s featurelist and checking out youtube for general scattering in a 3d package should help in giving you a good idea what you´ll really need? I had to do a photoreal forest once in 3DSMax and found it very hard to first of all get assets that would be believable themself. In terms of workflow, personally, I would appreciate a (painted) map based control workflow, where you define areas and fill those with a predefined group of assets. I´d also long for being able to have seperate groups of assets based on their size but still with as minimum intersection as possible, e.g. where there´s a rock there is no gras and where there´s a tree there is no rock. I wouldn´t even expect such rule based extravaganza but would welcome it. The minimum requirement I would want is to be able to delete a specific instance or maybe even replace it with something else easily. Milan Vasek´s Scatter tools v1.1 looks more evolved than what I had access to. Very nice, especially since you have multiple ways of control and can place hero elements easily. Cheers, tim On 01.02.2014 16:41, Enrique Caballero wrote:
Thanks Nick and Jordi, I will check out scatter tools now. Jordi I agree completely with what you say, and at One Animation I usually only get about 1 to 2 weeks to develop anything. So I am very willing to try an out of box solution. I started playing with Vue Extreme today, it seems pretty powerful, but wow its not enjoyable at all to use, I will keep experimenting with it until i understand it better. I will also try world builder now thanks to your recommendation. -E On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 10:55 PM, Jordi Bares <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Very impressive tools.. :-) Sill amazed by what people produce with ICE Jordi Bares [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> On 1 Feb 2014, at 11:58, Nick Angus <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:Milan Vasek’s Scatter Tools are my best friend when it comes to this sort of stuff.https://vimeo.com/36612233____ He has created some pretty astounding imagery with them alsohttp://www.milanvasek.com/?p=355____ More advanced stuff that uses libraries of assets would have been used by the folks at Whiskytree, Steve Caron might be able to elaborate.____ But if you combine Scatter tools with Arnold instancing you pretty much have the best solution out of the box in my opinion.____ Cheers, Nick____ *From:*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:softimage- <mailto:softimage->[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>]*On Behalf Of*Enrique Caballero *Sent:*Saturday, 1 February 2014 3:50 PM *To:*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> *Subject:*Set Dressing Tool Ideas____ __ __ Hey everyone,____ I was hoping to pick your brains.____ __ __ I am currently doing some research on how to simplify, and make cheaper our set dressing process over at this small shop that I work at.____ __ __ In the old days, when we did small simple shows, set dressing wasn't very difficult for us as there were limited amounts of props and environment pieces. We would just import referenced models and place them by hand/____ __ __ But now that we do full forests and large amounts of rocks and plant life, we need to upgrade our techniques. As our original techniques are no longer sufficient.____ __ __ __ __ __ __ I am looking at how ICE can help us with the initial set dressing. Maybe by painting weight maps we can spawn different types of mushrooms and trees etc.____ __ __ __ __ I am currently experimenting with Dart Throw, and it looks very promising. Thanks Julian!____ __ __ Although I need to figure out how to get it to switch between different geo types, IE. Trees, mushrooms, etc. Currently I can only get it to spawn one geo type at a time.____ __ __ I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about how we could simplify this stuff, as I said before, currently I am looking at Dart throw and ABScatter to see if they can help us out, but I am open minded. Has anyone tried Vue Studio or anything similar that they can recommend?____ __ __ best,____ Enrique
