Arnold displacement

[hyperviktor]

How can the scattered objects have arnold displacement? t seems forest pro ignores arnold properties. Is this a bug or simply just a missing feature ?

Or am I just missing something ?

[Michal Karmazín]

Hi,

For these purposes, there's the Place items on a displaced surface Effect (to position the objects on the Z axis to match the displaced mesh with additional controls to randomize each item's position on the Z axis). In the case of the Arnold renderer, you can use the Follow Displaced Surface (V-Ray) one, and link the DisplaceAmount value to the controller of the Height property within the Arnold Properties modifier.

I hope that helps.

Best regards,

[hyperviktor]

Nope , this is not what I meant. The object we'd like to scatter have arnold properties and displacement applied to them, such as med poly rocks with high poly detail applied as displacement.

How do we keep the arnold properties and the displacement on the scattered objects so they all have displacement applied ?

[Michal Karmazín]

Thanks for your swift reply and sorry for the misunderstanding. In such a case, please use Forest Tools and export all distributed items to instances. You can find it under Utilities - More... - Forest Tools. For more detailed information, please feel free to check our online reference guide. I hope that helps.

Best regards,

[hyperviktor]

That's not very good, we have hundreds of assets we want to scatter on a ground and you're suggesting the only solution is to manually add displacement ? Or if we convert them ito instance, will they have automatically the arnold property added ?

It seems Itoo really doesn't care much about arnold, which is one of the top renderers that is available for max ?

[Michal Karmazín]

These instances will automatically have the Arnold Properties modifier applied without requiring any extra manual work. We will explore potential solutions in future versions to overcome this limitation - our main developers will check what can be done. Thanks for your understanding.

Best regards,

[RealViz]

That's not very good, we have hundreds of assets we want to scatter on a ground and you're suggesting the only solution is to manually add displacement ? Or if we convert them ito instance, will they have automatically the arnold property added ?

It seems Itoo really doesn't care much about arnold, which is one of the top renderers that is available for max ?

However, this is not a limitation only for arnold, but for all other renders as well.

[RealViz]

I found that if you turn on "Non-geometry object" in Geometry, Displace works. However, I haven't done further testing and I don't know if this will have a big effect on performance.
Michal Karmazín: Is it possible to use it this way, or is it completely wrong? :-)

[Michal Karmazín]

That's definitely an option - when the "Non-Geometric Object" option is enabled, Forest creates instances as hidden nodes in the scene before rendering, and deletes them once rendering is completed (it's like an automatic Forest Tools, creating and deleting nodes in the scene before and after rendering). As mentioned previously, we will explore potential solutions in future versions. At the moment, in the case of the Arnold renderer, Forest items are converted to a mesh because the Arnold/3ds Max interface for Arnold doesn't support instancing scene nodes directly.

Best regards,