[HELP] Populating multiple objects (pine trees)

[Fred Bentley]

PRE:
I am new on Terragen so please bear with me

So I am trying to populate my scene with multiple objects (.obj) and I was wondering why after instancing one  object multiple times, all the other instanced objects don't show up.

I am recreating a snow-valley  and I have 3 levels of trees, indeed on a different altitude;
Green on the bottom, brown in the middle and snowy on the top.. so I thought having a total of N instances and sharing 3 different distribution shaders would work.

OBJ LIST
{
   4 Green Pinetrees [small, medium, big, huge]
   4 Brown Pinetrees [small, medium, big, huge]
   4 Snowy Pinetrees [small, medium, big, huge]
}


To make it more clear, there's a picture of my node editor!


The only thing that shows up in my render is the one circled in green, so just one instance of one single tree..

I've pressed [Populate Now] and [Random Seed] on each single one thinking that the trees were actually overlapping but nothing changed.
Any help would be super appreciated!

[luvsmuzik]

Question 1: Which version of Terragen are you using? ie, free, creative , pro, etc

Your examples are great for your question, but that will be the first clue.

Question 2:
Are you getting error messages?

[Fred Bentley]

Terragen 4 free, No errors

[luvsmuzik]

Terragen 4 free is limited to 3 populations, I believe.
There are several ways to distribute 3 populations, so you could fiddle around to get great coverage with even just 3.

[Dune]

You can use one pop for the three 'colors' if you use some internal recoloring of the whole population (search for population variation, and you may find useful threads). They won't be really mixed though but gradually change color. Though that can be overcome with more fancy mixing methods. The whole population needs to have min/max altitudes (mask the population) of the whole range.
This is one basic method; you'd need to make another set of browner autumn leave textures (Photoshop) and use a merge shader with a controller (altitude). Look inside the object of the population for these controls. It needs to be adapted to your trees of course.
I hope this helps.

[Fred Bentley]

Very useful! thanks a lot for the support.

I think I found the problem, which was setting on each populator the same settings (e.g. Area Lenght and coverage.) 

[bobbystahr]

But you will be limited to only 3 populations so even though you've found your error you will only get the first 3 you load/hook up. Dune's suggestion is well worth experimenting with.