Procedural Primitives for a Procedural Tool.

[deecue]

although to my Alberta trained eyes that looks like perfectly good wheat - not weeds

do dado da do doo... :music:

that is one fine Alberta trained eye my friend.. i actually used wheat as a reference (weeds seemed to be boring).. i suppose i could green them up a bit, but eh, it is way too early on in this to even be thinking about it.. so, wheat it is!

and there are some floating rocks on the hill

hey, those rocks are special! special rocks! rocks that contain special...stuff..! :dots: [sigh] stupid rocks.. fixing 'em now..

gracias arctor..

[deecue]

wow.. that was an easier fix than i expected it would be.. see i was using the terrain as a basis for a point attribute to affect the scattering.. problem was, i wanted more points so i could be more accurate with the attribute.. so i subdivided.. problem with that was the subdivide was affecting the the geometry slightly (especially on the hills).. so i just cranked up the crease amount and bam, same number of points, but no more geometry altering..

so now the rocks are not so special anymore.. just good ol' rocks with non-levitating capabilities..

to answer you question aracid.. i don't know of any ways to treat instancing like you can with the param() function.. i've always wondered about this but it would be pretty sweet if there is a way. maybe someone around here has a thought or two..

[edward]

is there any way when using point instancing, i can overwrite a file SOP entry or using a otl, just change the parameter before it renders for each instance?

much like what u would do with a copy sop, and param into the file sop.

18089[/snapback]

Er, you can use HscriptInstance. Or a custom procedural.

[Andz]

this project is still very early on (in pre-vis stage) but you get the gist of things...

18079[/snapback]

Looks realy nice already. Pastel colors remind me of some pixar stuff.

I'll try to study instancing as soon as possible.

[DaJuice]

I like the ground shader deecue. Looks a bit like camoflauge.

[deecue]

thanks for the comments guys..

dajuice: the ground shader is the good old gvop stonewall from the shader palette.. it was there, it was easy, so it got used.. i was actually considering changing it as time went on, but for some reason, it's oddly growing on me..

[anakin78z]

to answer you question aracid.. i don't know of any ways to treat instancing like you can with the param() function.. i've always wondered about this but it would be pretty sweet if there is a way. maybe someone around here has a thought or two..

18096[/snapback]

Not quite copy/stamping, but you can change any shader attribute per instance. In the shader sop, turn on 'Generate point attributes for instancing'. and turn off 'Use indirect references'. If you check out your point attributes, you'll find that they're long strings with all your shader attributes. It's a little tricky from here on, but you could essentially replace parts of that string per point, and each instance will have it's own set of shader parameters. I believe you don't need all attributes in there either (missing parameters will use defaults), so you could replicate the string with just a few parameters in an attribcreate sop. In your case you could offset some noises or colors to get different looking rocks or wheats, and maybe even apply a displacement shader to change the shape of each instance slightly.

One warning though: if you're using very large shaders, you'll find that it takes forever for mantra to start. If you'll be swapping attributes like this, try to use shaders with as few parameters as possible, and you won't see much of a hit. Either way renders are very fast .

-z

[deecue]

thanks anakin78z, definitely a good idea to change some things up a bit shader wise.. but it would be really cool if you could do geometry altering per instance much like you can with the shader altering.. right now, i'm pretty much limited to the point position and direction of the normal..

btw, for those of you who don't know how to go the per instance shader route with the opdef command, check out the light instancing tutorial over at SESI..