Grouping plants

[mhaze]

Increasingly I find myself using 20 to 30 plants in a render.  It would be really useful to be able to group them into clumps and then populate with those clumps as a separate object.  Any ideas as to how this could be achieved.

[Dune]

The problem would be that a larger clump cannot sit properly on uneven ground, the individuals at the borders will either float or duck. For the time being best is still to make PF's as clump areas, and distribute certain species accordingly.

[mhaze]

Hadn't thought of that - oh well.

[Tangled-Universe]

This is a very often occuring and well known request to Planetside.
They plan to do it in the future, considering previous responses to this request here.
However, only Planetside knows whether that's far or near future, and how one interprets these

Hopefully it will appear in 3.5

Cheers,
Martin

[PabloMack]

Perhaps what mhaze wants could be implemented as a parent-child relationship. An example would be a tree that provides shade cover for understory plants such as ferns. A child cannot be there unless a tree is near by to "seed" the population of understory plants within proximity of the tree. You could actually define a population of null objects and then arrange clumps around those as a child population of the population of null objects.

What I would like to see is a way to simultaneously define a mix of plants and their overall density of a "Plant Community". This would allow someone to specify that Plant A makes up X% of the individuals, Plant B makes up Y% of the individuals and Plant C makes up Z% of the "community". I am under the impression that Vue already has "Plant Communities". This is actually what happens in the wild. I would also like to see altitudinal population distribution limits optionally as nodal inputs and not just set as internal constants.

[Tangled-Universe]

Yes those are definitely very interesting ideas Pablo
First things first, I'd tend to say or think though.

First lets hope this finally gets to see the light of day in a simple form like controlling multiple populations with a master node or the like.
Then after that your good(!) ideas can be added to it.
Unless they want to do this all at once, but I guess the near future will be out of the question then as it sounds like quite a lot of work and Planetside isn't exactly swimming in resources.

[jaf]

Unless you model your plants, this probably won't help.  When I model a plant in Lightwave, I usually make several versions -- different sizes, rotations, flowers or not, etc.  Then I can "clump" them together as a separate object as well as keeping the separate plants.  As mentioned, unless you plan on a large area of flat terrain, spreading them too wide may cause "floating" or "buried" plants (building the model with a stem slightly below a Y elevation of zero can sometimes help.)

In the southwest US, there are species of yucca's that tend to clump in a small circle ( the younger plants radiate out and the older ones die off leaving a circle of living plants), so this technique works particularly well in that case.  Palm trees with the classic "V" can be done that way too.

[edit] should have written "Palm trees with the classic "X".

[mhaze]

All of the above are great ideas.  I'm just looking for a lazy way of loading pops by grouping and preferably saving them as a group!.