Scattering Addons ?

Hi I’m new to Blender coming from a 20 year run with 3dsmax. Blender is starting to come of age and seems like its a good time start learning it. I’ve been playing with it on and off for the last year and am quite impressed.
One area I feel it lacks is in Scattering, in 3dsmax having access to Forest Pro, Multiscatter and Corona renders own Scatter, Blender could do with a full fledged Scatting addon. I’ve been playing with Particles and Andrew Prices Grass Essentials,its a nice start. However the work flow is slow. Having to manually paint the view cone of the Camera onto the ground so you don’t have excess scatter objects off Camera that don’t need to be rendered is a bit tiresome.

So is there any addons that I am unaware of ? or something that Blender are looking into ?

cheers

Don’t have to. Cycles render can cull objects outside camera, or outside distance.

I think particles are not perfect, but not too bad either. Can’t think of any plugins for that and I doubt I would be able to advice, but just out of interest - could you tell more about the work you need it for and functionality needed? What is it specifically that you currently find most slow/anoying/not functional with particles? Maybe there are faster workflows with current tools. I would think it might be worth exploring. Plus there is Python scripting. I know learning programming might not look so apealing, but I think it’s also possible to get help from the community if you need something specific that happens not to be extremely complicated. I mean it’s just object positions we are talking about here, doesn’t sound like absolutely the hardest thing to code in the world. Anyway it would be interesting to hear more about your specific situation.

and extending JA12’s post, if particles are instances, they don’t take so much memory themselfs. Perhaps a bigger overhead in building the bvhtree, wich may not be suitable for animations (thought the bvhtree can be cached).

I think part of the problem is with a lot of particles it slows down and becomes hard to handle, so things like lots of grass the PC starts to crawl along. I have 32GB Ram, Nvidia 970 and 5820k. I find importing geometry with random size faces Particles don’t spread evenly over the surface, smaller faces have lots and large faces have now.

For workflow, its probably easiest to just show you one of many forest pros videos

I think part of the problem is with a lot of particles it slows down and becomes hard to handle, so things like lots of grass the PC starts to crawl along. I have 32GB Ram, Nvidia 970 and 5820k. I find importing geometry with random size faces Particles don’t spread evenly over the surface, smaller faces have lots and large faces have now.

For workflow, its probably easiest to just show you one of many forest pros videos