Itoo Software Forum

Author Topic: Applyinf Forest (pro or lite) to a sphere or box surface?  (Read 4983 times)

madail

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 2
Applyinf Forest (pro or lite) to a sphere or box surface?
« on: June 02, 2011, 05:31:38 PM »
Hi there,

I'm currently looking for available solutions to apply in an ongoing project we have.

Basically it depicts a "cartoon" planet with trees popping from an animated rotating sphere. The "popping" is a simple animation of scaled xform gizmo.

1- I tried with Forest Lite and apparently it doesnt distribute objects along spheres, merely planar surface, correct?

What about Pro? How would that be possible? I asked a colleague who uses it and he said that trying to apply forest Pro to a sphere would only apply to half the surface and if it would be applied to a box then just the top face would have "trees".

It seems as that nothing that is vertical will have objects scattered...

2 - Apart from that issue, the 2nd question would be related to animated objects to be distributed. In the same case where the trees pop out of the planet, i would make a single (or more for variation) tree, apply an xform modifier and animate its gizmo.
Now what i would want is so that each tree begins this animation in the point when it appears. Other scattering systems i've tried did not accomplish this, they simply made the animation happen in the first frames, meaning that trees popping out after that would just appear completely "grew" (hope i'm making sense).

Please, any ideas on this?
Thanks

iToo

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 4388
    • iToo Software
Re: Applyinf Forest (pro or lite) to a sphere or box surface?
« Reply #1 on: June 02, 2011, 07:30:39 PM »
Hello,

Quote
1- I tried with Forest Lite and apparently it doesnt distribute objects along spheres, merely planar surface, correct?

Yes, this is a limitation of the Lite version.

Quote
What about Pro? How would that be possible? I asked a colleague who uses it and he said that trying to apply forest Pro to a sphere would only apply to half the surface and if it would be applied to a box then just the top face would have "trees".

This feature has been included in Forest Pro 3.5.0 beta. Now it includes a UV surface mode, allowing to scatter items over any type of surface:

http://www.itoosoft.com/forum/index.php?topic=786.0

Quote
Now what i would want is so that each tree begins this animation in the point when it appears.

You can delay randomly the animation of each item, using the Animation parameters (http://www.itoosoft.com/forestpack/reference/refanimation.php). I'm not sure if this would work for you scene. You can test it using Forest Lite.

Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

madail

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 2
Re: Applyinf Forest (pro or lite) to a sphere or box surface?
« Reply #2 on: June 02, 2011, 07:55:00 PM »
Hi there Carlos, many thanks for the info.

Any possibility to test out a 3.5 beta demo or something?

Hmm, from what you're saying about the random delay of the animation, it seems pretty much what i was able to do with other plugs, but never being able to have each one start the animation based on it's appearance.

Maybe that makes a nice request for a feature. It if you come to think of it, there are plenty of situations where this can be very nice creativity wise.

Imagine you wanted to create a field of growing trees, having a grey-scaled mask (say just a gradient ramp) that drives the density or "appearance" of the distributed objects. This would be enough to show them. But now if you had previously animated the growing of the tree and could actually click a check box such as "animation start frame based of object visibility" this would make an incredible powerful system! :)

Thank you!

iToo

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 4388
    • iToo Software
Re: Applyinf Forest (pro or lite) to a sphere or box surface?
« Reply #3 on: June 02, 2011, 08:17:24 PM »

No, sorry. The beta is available only for users of Forest Pro, and we have not demos of the Pro versions.

We will think on your suggestion, i think it could be done and for sure it is an interesting feature.

Carlos Quintero
iToo Software