Quote from: DutchDimension on June 11, 2011, 04:00:59 PM
Thanks Martin. I figured as much, judging by the excessive load times and memory consumption. I had hoped TG would be able to re-use the geometry.
And yes, you are correct. I am trying to have absolute control over the duplicates' transform coordinates.
I suppose I'll have to resort to using a population with a painted shader for placement control (sacrificing rotation and scale placement in the process) unless there are other tricks out there that I am unaware of?
As a suggestion for Matt & Jo, maybe in a future iteration the 'Filename/Load' part of the 'Reader' nodes could be split off from the 'Transform', 'Angular Position', Surface Shaders' and '* Options' part. Have them as two separate nodes that could be recombined in the 'Node Graph'? That way a single 'Reader' node could feed into a multitude of "Transform/Placement" nodes.
Cheers! 
Danny
You can use a painted shader to "place" instances, but in fact you're only increasing the probability an instance will be created there, since it's only a mask and not a 'guide' for the algorithm where to put instances.
Also you won't be able to control per instance rotation and such. If you add scale variation then this will be randomnly distributed among all the instances so you need 'luck' to get a tree in your painted area and to have it the required size as well.
(You can add rotation in the object node to rotate every instance. I always do this for trees because that looks more natural than perfectly straight up standing trees).
The feature you tolk about is a kind of master-node which controls the population-area and other parameters for multiple populations in one single node.
This has been requested many times before and as far as I know is also a real feature request on the alpha forum, so at least Planetside is already aware this wish.
It's definitely one of mine too.
