I’m creating a mangrove scene in Blender with a boardwalk and some morning fog. See following image (btw: still relatively new to Blender, what do you think?).
First I used hair particles to distribute the mangroves over a plain. Now, I’m trying to change that to geometry nodes, so I can have more options with animation of individual trees for wind.
I’m distributing the trees using a weight painted vertex group. However, the trees are still scattered along the blue zones where no trees are supposed to be… See following image.
Hum, that’s weird…
But , it should be more logical to plug the vertex group into the density rather than the selection.
You can add a Math / Multiply node set to 0.1 to control the density according to the vertex group.
Selection is a boolean, it expect either 0 or 1 values, try it and see if that works better.
Or , share the .blend and replace the tree by something like a cube
It gets weirder: when I draw a new vertex group, it adds the trees when I draw an area with a weight of 1, but than when I draw over that with a weight of 0, it does not remove the trees… So now I have a fully blue field with values of 0, but still the trees are there…
It’s probably just not updating on weight paint changes. Tab into and out of edit on the plane to force an update. Or else, you didn’t subtract all of the weight (even 0.00001 counts for a boolean like “selection”.) But we’re going to need a file to see what’s going; my own experiments on this with nearly the same setup as you are working fine:
Edit: @bandages, you are right with the weight: even 0.0001 counts as a selection with a Boolean. Painting blue over and over and over on it starts to remove the instances.
This is not very usefull though… How can I make it so that it distributes the actual density that you paint onto it? I can’t get it to work with float or something else. Is it even possible?
Woke up at 4AM and all of sudden thought of that too…
It works! Turning the Vertex Group into a floating point and then multiply it with a density factor, plugging it into the density, gets me exactly what I want!
Next step is to figure out how I can animate all trees individually, bending them, so that I can have some cool randomized wind effects. If somebody has any thoughts?
