Max: Evenly scatter objects on a surface (or: How to create grass?)

THE 5

Non gameart related question this time, sorry for that.
I am once aggain working on a grassy field.
Last time I were placing mrProxie-instances of a grass patch with the help of the "Scatter Utility" and the "Advanced Painter" plugin, which gave me some problems.

• The Scatter Utility requires the number of instances to be placed. I want the field to be nicely covered and just guessing numbers till it looks right involves a lot of hold/fetch-ing.
• Doing it by hand with the Advanced Painter just takes ages, it's great for fixing individual parts though.
• It never realy gives a "even" result, there are mostly verry dense spots.

A different approach would be to do it with a particle system (mrProxies can't be handled by it, but there is a script for that) but that wont guarantee evenly placement aswell. For grass one could also use Displacement for distant grass but that renders so slowly and does not look that good.

I am suhre there was a thread about how to create grass (for offline rendering) here before, but I can't find that one. Maybe was another forum. Generaly the question is how to evenly scatter a object on a surface, prefearably only on selected faces.

sprunghunt

typically CG grass in movies/TV is just fur with different settings.

THE 5

But then aggain it will calculate quite a while.
I should make a little clearer that this is not only abbout grass, moeover what the thread title says "evenly scattering". Know about any scripts that like, take a input for the density ot such?

Joseph Silverman

Look up the Array tool in your 3dsmax help file, see if you can find a solution there

r_fletch_r

have you tried falloff map set to distance blend, mapped to the fur density. that way you only draw fur for near camera grass. might be worth a look. invert the map and use it as a placement map for a Particle flow system.

THE 5

SupRore wrote: »

Look up the Array tool in your 3dsmax help file, see if you can find a solution there

Will have a look at that (thought that could not align the object to face normals).

r_fletch_r wrote: »

have you tried falloff map set to distance blend, mapped to the fur density. that way you only draw fur for near camera grass. might be worth a look. invert the map and use it as a placement map for a Particle flow system.

I used the fallof for Displacement but didn't thik about usign it with fur.
What you mena with your PFlow statement? Using fur and combinign it with a PFlow or did you just point out I could use the distance blend for PF aswell?

I still wonder if there is a script that scatters a source object evenly (didn't check the array tool yet though), for example when I would want to place pebbles or something that cant be done with fur or displacement. Probably the sollution is PFlwo, but I did not work with that much yet.