Just to add my 2 cents, hope it's not considered as hijacking the thread.
The workflow in Houdini described above applies to most 3d apps. For example, 3ds max has built-in and 3rd party tools that allow to scatter objects or several objects within a group conveniently, with a lot of possibilities to scale, rotate, tilt, tint objects etc. Many other apps have this either built in or available as a 3rd party plugin, too.
Since the Populator node is certainly one of the most important tools in TG to produce realistic landscapes its improvement should be high on the list of features to implement imho. There are various additions I would find useful (and overdue, considering how easy it is to achieve this in 3d apps in general):
- Populate objects within a group: Let's say you can load 10 different trees and assign a percentage to each of them which defines how often it'll be present in the whole population node.
- Populator nodes whould be aware of each other so they don't share the same coordinates for the population. Right now, the workaround is to mask each population so they don't overlap, unfortunately, this is the most complicated way to solve the issue of intersections. This could be done way easier by 'locking' coordinates that have already been taken by a present Populator node.
- A way to control control scatter amount, scatter density, object size, rotation, tilt angle, tilt amount and color by terrain properties (like height, slope, terrain normal) and maps. This will make populating much more powerful.
I know the list of feature requests is long but please put the Populator node somewhere in the top 5
