Simple Scatter Plugin

[Rawalanche]

@fafmagic

Hey. I really like the look of this product. The closest thing to ForestPack I’ve seen in Unreal. Awesome work!

I will probably be purchasing it soon but I did wonder if it was currently possible to scatter certain meshes in the falloff areas of a defined scatter area? (either from a texture mask or spline falloff).

For instance, in the support videos you show that you are able to affect the scale of the scatter meshes in the falloff areas of a soft image mask. That’s great. What you’re basically suggesting there is the plants/trees are younger/smaller the further into the falloff they get. This is perfect for grass and bushes where younger plants are just smaller versions of the adult plants. In trees however, a younger tree would be a totally different mesh to an adult tree.

So in this instance, could you specify that adult trees grow in the white areas of the image mask and then a different mesh (the younger trees) grow in the grey falloff areas of the mask?

If you can’t currently do that, might I add it as a suggestion as I think then you’ve got pretty much everything covered!

The problem with these task specific features is that there are hundreds if not thousands of them. That would defeat the purpose of the scatter being simple and would turn it into something as ugly as the ForestPack UI, in terms of usability. It would start with “spawn different meshes on the edges” and would continue with “spawn different meshes based on attitude”, then “spawn different meshes based on slope, because different bushes will grow on cliffs” and so on.

I like to trade efficiency in very specific scenario for more simplicity and ease of use in majority of basic scenarios. Otherwise, the scatter would end up having 100’s of “make this very specific scenario” buttons, knobs and multipliers.

That being said :mad:

What you want is quite doable:

Dark green cubes are stand ins for mature trees and bright green cubes are supposed to be young trees.
I’ve created first scatter, where I’ve just used distribution map to drive only distribution, not scale of the mature trees:

I have then made another scatter for young trees. Here I’ve color corrected the same distribution map to erode it a bit outwards, and then subtracted the distribution map of the mature tree scatter from it (R channel drives density, G drives scale):

So now you have young trees not growing where the mature ones do, and young tree scale fading away from the edges of the forest. If you take the mature tree distribution texture and the adjustments made to it and wrap it in a material function which you reference in the distribution material of the young tree scatter, then distributions of both these scatter objects become linked and you don’t need to manually keep them in sync.

Also, the young trees are smaller so they required more density. Imagine having to do all of that in single scatter. Now people would not only require button to have different meshes on the edges, but also different instance density on the edges, and then different transform randomization on the edges, and then they would want same for the slopes, etc… It would get ugly really fast and could turn into another space shuttle cockpit dashboard thing that the ForestPack is. This approach, while a bit more laborious, does not compromise usability for less complex use cases, but does not stop you from flexible solutions like this one