This add-on is going to change Blender forever. Seriously it is undoubtedly the best choice for scattering foliage and such. It’s such a powerful tool. As soon as you have smart presets for Graswald and The Grass Essentials users I will purchase this instantaneously!
Please tell me you plan on re-creating the first few grass meadow pictures you posted up top inside of your scatter plugin! If you made presets for those it would be a no-matter-what buy for most Blender artists. You absolutely killed it on GSG Studio Slot 2 and Test-01. Is the shading different in these or is it only lighting?
Dang!!! I can’t wait to buy this. This is INCREDIBLE!
I can see how legally that may be impossible. However, I have just spoken with a colleague of mine and picked his brain and he had an idea that I thought I would re-iterate.
If you have Graswald yourself or have The Grass Essentials yourself BD3D I’m pretty sure you can direct the code to the assets. If you have Graswald or TGE basically what you can do is you can put those assets into their own folder within a folder called “Smart Assets”. So it would be like “Smart Assets” as a folder, with two folders inside “The Grass Essentials” and “Graswald”. At that point you would add your asset of TGE or Graswald into it and you would make the preset in Blender and get it looking like you planned in the beginning when you talked about smart assets. After you have it looking amazing you can bake the code and at this point you can delete the asset from the folder so you don’t have to ship Scatter with other people’s assets. Now you have the EXACT code set to make Graswald and TGE beautiful with a smart asset system and you have a folder to put them in for purchasers of Scatter. Now all that the purchaser has to do is to add the assets within the specific folder within the Smart Assets folder. That way if it’s missing it just says “Missing Assets” until the user puts the smart assets in the correct folder within the “Smart Assets” folder. For an example, right now you have a Scatter plugin download, and you have a “Preset” folder that we download and put with the Scatter plugin to have presets. What if you added one last folder within the Preset folder, called Smart Assets or something with a folder to put the Graswald assets in and a separate folder to put the Grass Essentials assets in? If so all the Scatter purchasers would have to do is put their Graswald or TGE assets into the specified TGE or Graswald folder inside of the Smart Assets folder and they could have a preset made by you because it would then find the assets in the place you originally created the code for. I’m 99.99% sure you don’t have to ship Scatter with the assets with this solution. You create the presets, create the code, have the code search for the assets in the original folder, and delete the asset from the folder where the code is directed to so that purchasers can input their Graswald or TGE assets into that folder.
At this point it’s as easy as dragging and dropping the assets into the smart asset folder that you have created and now the earlier code you made works on everyone’s Graswald and TGE without you having to ship Graswald or TGE
I doubt the authors of Graswald have anything against some kind of compability system between add-ons. Just look how nicely hardops and decal machine work together. With team work everybody wins.
I wish I had some time to help but I can only eagerly watch the development and have my wallet at the ready for a final release. I’ve only just started my blender journey. Good luck and I’m sure some awesome people out there will get involved with you.
I can collaborate with multiples artist down the line. The plan is to have multiples official pack made, I already heard other assets reseller want to make their own packs
I just want to supervise mines. I feel like most grass models for blender except graswald are a bit crappy.
I was messing with one of the files above and no idea if I’m using it right, but does this scatter in respect to the normal? Like so its aligned to a sloped surface? I must be missing a checkbox.
Great work though, I really needed something like this and I’m glad Blender will have it!
new feature for the image based scattering, if this feature is set on in the addon pref custom slots, scatter will search for ‘terrainname.jpg’ in image data and automatically choose it as an UV wrapped based scattering texture. really really really handy as you can scatter your bakes instantly.
here i used it with a terrain but specific features for terrain will come later.
this useage for terrain is no that appropriate right now.
On forest pack, there is a special add on which effectively installs a library browser with preview images relevant to the assets from commercial sources eg. Xfrog. i.e there is an xfrog addon.
All this really does is to install an Xfrog section to the model list, populates it with previews and saves links to the directories where the assets are installed by you on your machine, for easy loading from within the forest pack menus. The forest pack addon is just the previews to the models - you have to buy them separately.
For scatter, we just need a way of associating the file location with a preview image of the model there and bring it in, then attach it to the scatter.
I hope I’ve understood what you meant and this is useful, apologies if I misunderstood.
@bd3d Great work on this add-on!
I ran across this video last night; It’s a live talk (Oct 10th) at Gnomon by one of the developers of Clarisse 4.0. There may be some ideals to take away on how to handle instancing, groups, libraries, bounding boxes, etc., for future versions.
Some crazy, insane, crazy, insane, crazy, insane, crazy, insane, (did I say insane yet?) stuff on using instancing and libraries. At one part of the demo an artist has 7.7 quadrillion (that’s more than trillion) objects modeled onto a scaled planet and running in (almost) real time rendered view in the viewport.
All done on CPU only, and the first demo done on a laptop.
Really liked the idea of adding collisions to group things and the way you can adjust the different items in the groups, like the natural clumping of certain species of tress while mixed in with a larger whole.
hey @CookItOff unfortunately there’s nothing i can do about performance.
I created special tools that can help us drastically get a better viewport performance (proxies, automatic hide on display/ bounding boxes/ display% toggling when rendered view ect, and carbon with point clouds) but users will still suffer from regular old blender viewport limitations.
Blender devs themselves need to resolve the problem, i’m just an addon developper, i don’t touch to blender core code… hopefully it will be resolve for 2.83 - 2.84
@IsaacAsimow thanks a lot. i don’t think this kind of easy and fast ui rework will interest them. they will put every effort in everything node now. and this will be even less UI friendly than before, forcing you to noodling around to get what you want.
i’ll ask if they’d like to incorporate scatter officially in blender after hair particles node is released and scatter is completely reworked for this massive update… i still find that not waiting for a big 2.9 release for releasing everything jacque lucke related is a really bad idea. as it totally destroy blender and every addons for minor 0.0X update… this is ridiculous.
UPDATE 1.15
https://we.tl/t-Dohbh58ltk
extract .rar preset file in the import/export folder.
please do this each time. as i’m working on the code, each presets need to change
please give it a quick try, and leave feedback if you want, ect.
user can choose to use one or multiples textyre to influence the scatter distribution. all will be shipped with the addon. they all either handmade / cc0 / heavely reworked.
some seams are bad, i do not have time to do such minor task, if someone want to rectify them or propose new one (copyright free) they are really welcome i think i cover a lor of interresting scatter. but maybe you think that others are needed ?
there’s a “terrain bake” preset.
its really simple, scatter will try to find the terrain name in the image data and automatically set it as an texture influence set to uv, scale 1 and coord 0
really handy using a baked cycles material as a particle distribution.
(image above is not the same one as the one in the gif, normally it must be reverted)
i don’t recommand using it with terrains tho. special tools for terrains lope/elevation will come later.
you can even choose to have two images influencing the same particle system. this is not possible with current blender build as there’s no option to choose the multiplication method between two texture in the ui (code is avaible tho, i think they forgot some dropdowns)
Just one thing, could you make small getting started videos, I tried your addon last time and I must say I didn’t understand how everything worked, the terrain got rotated with the particles and it took a very long time before updating the changes I was making.
I’m sure it’s on my end that I didn’t do it right because it was a very simple scene, one plane and one particle (evermotion tree)
it’s present as an example in the presets.