texturing a population

[Grassynoel]

Hi all,
I want to populate my scene with rocks from Zbrush and while they are adopting the same textures as the terrain, the distribution of snow - rock is off (unsurprisingly as the distribution map needs surface normals if my guess is correct).
Is there a way to define slope (and altitude though I don't need it here) for my rocks so the snow is on top and rock is on the side despite their orientation?

Any help gladly accepted.
Glenn

[Dune]

Did you take the colors through a transform shader set to final position? I guess so. Then if you have slope restrictions in a surface layer, you should be able to do what you want. You could also try and take the rock colors separately from the snow colors and feed them into the rock, then add a fresh (newly made) snow layer with those slope restraints. But then you'd get snow on all rocks, so you'd have to mask it again by the terrain mask you use for rock/snow distribution. If you get my point 

[Grassynoel]

I haven't used a transform shader and on reading about it it seems only used to translate shares on xyz. Not sure how to use that.
If I make a simple scene and add a OBJ rock (not a population), I can't get surface layers to work correctly on it. I set them up the same as I have on my landscape without luck.

G

[Dune]

Try plugging a transform shader between the colors and the object's default shader, and just check 'final position'. That translates the colors to a world distribution, instead of translating it to the rock's distribution, so to speak. Works the same way as the grass pop I just posted a few days ago (tgd there).

[Grassynoel]

None of that is working for me.
Could you have a look at this simple scene and tell em how you would hook it up?

[Dune]

Here you are. This should work.

[Grassynoel]

Nice. Many thanks.

Seems like the "use Y" is totally important too. Pretty cryptic.
Needless to say I am off an acing. Thanks again.

[Kadri]

There are some rendering(?) artifacts but i like it.

[Grassynoel]

Oh absolutely. I am projecting a non tiling texture through the camera etc. Just testing and not really caring about the detail. Now I have the technique in place I can get busy making it nice

[Kadri]

[Grassynoel]

Looking more like this.. but still more to go

[Dune]

Cool already.

[bobbystahr]

Nice SciFi render, be interesting to see where you go with this...

[Grassynoel]

Well, here is an update. Not sure how I feel about it yet.

[Dune]

Very interesting and different. Any update depends on what you want to depict, what the story behind it is, but I like it as is. If it's hot, or explosion, you need smoke, if it's light not, but maybe some beams in a thin vapor would be interesting (shadows from surfaces)?