What should a new Population Shader have?

[Hetzen]

Seeing as this was one of the most requested features in the top 5 thread, I thought a new thread where we could talk about what we'd like to see in such a shader could be discused and maybe come to a common decision on what would be a practicle solution for Planetside to think about.

I'll start the ball rolling with the idea of setting up an internal network area of the shader where you could dump multiple object nodes with a probability value and a set of transform restrictions, like scale, rotation, and material colour shift/clumping.

Is this workable?

[deepdish]

I don't know if this is already implemented, but an already-built-in altitude/slope restriction setting

[Hetzen]

You can already do that with a Distribution Shader or Surface Shader, set up the constraints in it's settings, then in your Population check Use Density Shader, and use the button with the green cross on it to select the Distribution shader from that list.

[deepdish]

You can already do that with a Distribution Shader or Surface Shader, set up the constraints in it's settings, then in your Population check Use Density Shader, and use the button with the green cross on it to select the Distribution shader from that list.

That's what I thought was the case, but I thought it might be easier if it were implemented straight into the population thing, like as another tab on the node thingy 

I honestly can't think of anything else to implement, maybe a height variation slider (that's probabaly already covered with the scale restrictions sliders though )

[goldfarb]

in my reply to the top 5 thread:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6228.msg69732#msg69732
I mentioned Houdini's Copy SOP :
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini10.0/nodes/sop/copy

these are some very powerful features...

[kevnar]

I'm still kinda voting for colour variation of models, the way you can do with fakestones. I'm pretty sure the colours of models are rendered as-is though. It would be nice if you could randomly tint certain areas of distant trees to be more yellow, red, orange, etc.

[old_blaggard]

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned, but attaching more than one object to a populator so you don't have to keep resetting the position/scale/spacing/density values to have a variety of objects in an area.

[goldfarb]

I think many of these requests are really just one request:
the ability to control per-instance parameters

the list of these parameters would include - object (one, many, random from list etc), transform(translate offset, orientation, scale), etc etc etc