Hi all,
I have a couple of questions regarding populations
#1)
Im making populations for trees across a very large amount of terrain. I have a very long camera move across this terrain and im trying to reduce the amount of time it takes to create the population when the file is opened (i have a very dense set of populations, takes awhile). Im using a distance shader connected to my camera to control how many trees are placed radially away from the camera. At a certain distance away, I dont want trees anymore. I wanted to use the distance shader to limit the amount of trees computed, but it doesnt quite have that desired effect. It seems that the population is first computed using the distribution center and a,b sizes, and THEN it applies the distance shader to prune the amount of trees in the viewport. so no matter what Im waiting a really long time for the population to be created before rendering starts. Because I'd be populating on a frame by frame basis, this would kill my rendertimes.
So what im wondering is if there is some way to connect the distance shader in some cleaver way to the populations center position and a,b size parameters so that this 'moves' with the camera and therefore really speeds up population creation?
#2) Right now it seems that the default orientation of an object in a population is to be normal to the planet object. This is perfect for trees as they would grow in this fashion (always pointing to the sky). But this really doesnt work very well when distributing debris objects that are not spherical in nature (so rocks work great but nothing else). as it you get object cliffs when your terrain becomes more sloped. Is there a way to modify a populations controls to orient the instanced object normal to the surface its on rather than normal to planet? Im trying to create debris piles of logs, but because they wont orient normal to the terrain, they look really dumb. I think for instancing of any kind, this type of control is pretty important and Im hoping there might be a backdoor way to implement it since its not available in the controls directly. Has anyone achieved something like this?
Thanks!
