Populatior Question

[gregtee]

Not sure if this has been addressed before but I was wondering how one manages different object populations from intersecting with each other.  I want to build a scene where I'll have up to a dozen different types of plants and my first foray into placing them via the populator is many of them are dropping on top of each other.  I don't know if I'm missing something but is there a way to avoid this short of some type of custom map that defines where each population goes?

Thanks

Greg

[choronr]

You might avoid this issue of using the painted shader (mask) and paint-in the real estate appropriately.

[Oshyan]

There is no way to automatically avoid overlap. If you want the models to have the same general distribution but to not directly intersect, I'm afraid that's not really possible, it would be more a matter of random chance. However if you simply want to define areas where one model exists but *not* others and vise verse, you can do this with Distribution Shaders, and using invert for example, so that one population has the non-inverted map, those plants will exist in the white areas there, another population has the inverted version, so it essentially exists everywhere the other one *doesn't*, thus no overlap.

- Oshyan

[Tangled-Universe]

I'd go for Oshyan's suggestion. It's how I do it as well and the fastest and leanest way to do it I think.

Don't forget to set distribution shader coverage to 0.5 and fractal breakup to 1.
With these settings the coverage of the distribution shader is 100% controlled by fractal breakup.

Also, make sure you use higher value for contrast in the fractal breakup, at least 2.
This makes the fractal whites have hard edges. If you don't have these and have much grey in your fractal than population A and B can mix and intersect.
Roughness at default 5 is a bit high'ish for this purpose, but you can keep it if you like having trees from one population to be sparsely present in the other.
I usually use contrast 2-3 and roughness around 1, then offset is usually -0.3 to -0.6 to have whites and blacks be 50/50 visually.

[gregtee]

Great, thanks Martin.  I'll give it a try.


-Greg

[Dune]

There was someone, about 1-2 years ago, who set up a system using different colors (blue nodes involved), so more than 2 populations could be mixed without overlap. But I guess if you use some merge shaders and some hard edged fractals, you can do that as well.

[Chinaski]

If you want blue nodes... You can use the "step scalar" method.

This way you can have a "clean" source (power fractal or image map or whatever, with standart values, and no big contrast involved), and you can easily control your zoning and populations proportions.

[j meyer]

Chinaski - Very inspiring file,thanks for sharing.