Quote from: zaxxon on November 22, 2017, 09:37:19 PM
I've used a couple of different "scatter" tools and all have some interesting and different takes on populating multiple species of objects. Unreal for instance, allows a 'boundary' setting for each one of the species of multiple groupings; sort of neat as you can have ground-covers set back from tree trunks, or create nice random clumping, etc. For me something like the ability to load multiple objects and distribute them thru the populator tool would be great. The 'scatter' objects are hard at present to work with in TG: manually separating the sub-objects in a DCC app and then creating a diverse group object for import into TG only works so much; as the individual sub-objects don't conform to the terrain. I believe I saw that multiple object populations were a planned TG feature upgrade at some point, and I'm looking forward to whatever you folks come up with.
In the past when I've talked about "multi-object populations", what I usually meant is a population that contains objects of more than one type, or species, or variant. It's main goal is to be able to do more with just one populator node so that we don't have to duplicate so many masks and other settings just to get some rich variety. For example, I might want to load in 5 different models of pine tree and have the populator randomly pick each instance from this set of 5. Or I might take it further and build a simple ecosystems of multiple species of trees, bushes and grasses, all within one populator.
The realism would depend on what sort of rules could be defined for distribution of each species within the populator. I know that in other apps you can control some interesting attributes for each species to have them interact with other objects in realistic ways when they are scattered over the landscape. I would look at applying some of those ideas as attributes to the different models that are loaded into the multi-object populator. Multi-object populators in Terragen would therefore be a kind of ecosystem which can be masked and distributed
en masse if you want. But perhaps this is a much too Terragen-specific way of looking at things and there is probably a better way.
When someone talks about 'scatter' tools, this is what I think they mean. Often with some physics simulation to figure out where things fall on the ground. But you say "scatter objects" I think you are talking about something more? No matter what kind of distribution rules are available in this multi-object populator idea, it's still assuming that we select a bunch of object files or models in a database (or perhaps an ecosystem preset that says which models to use) and putting them into one populator node. It also assumes that each object is pre-made (probably in some other app) to sit at the origin, although some physics simulation could help us to work with models that are not placed at the origin. But beyond that, it sounds to me like you are also looking for ways to take a model that exists in a file, without any pre-defined grouping, and to automatically break it into separate pieces so that the physics simulation can scatter those pieces. This would be great. Do other tools already do this (breaking an object into pieces automatically) and Terragen needs to catch up? or is it an area where we could break (ha ha) new ground (haha)? Puns totally not intended, except perhaps by my subconscious.
Matt