Distribution by texture

[thefox]

Yes.

Watched the Boston presentation from 2012 (actually got a little nervous of his wild movement in the recorded viewport while explaining- but well..) and saw the vertex paint part.
He did not show the process of making the orientation follow the painting but showed how to use vertex paint in general (as he had collapsed the stack by that time already..) so I can only assume he did it by hand but this would have taken quite a while to get it done right!

If there's some magic trick I missed tell me, otherwise the same procedure applies to vertex paint as well as to viewport canvas use in a similar way- both with its advantages.

Not REALLY practical so far. Maybe with some 3rd party plugin, I recently posted some request on cgarchitect, maybe..

Thanks a lot for your effort!! I really appreciate it!

There is still this question of how to gain a more jagged edge for distribution as mentioned above..
I dont want to mix and mess this all up, should I recreate the question in another thread?

Regards
Niko

[Paul Roberts]

Hi,

If you don't mind creating your maps in a separate app, It might be helpful to know that GIMP, an open source alternative to photoshop, does have the ability to paint maps according to brush direction. It's not ideal because you can't paint directly in max but it's another option, and in the past I've found it's a quick way of painting direction maps.



Cheers,

Paul

[Michal Karmazín]

Hi,

Regarding the "jagged edge":

Probably the most flexible and easy way is to "paint" your custom Distribution Map. I'll recommend you to use the Viewport Canvas tool as this way you'll be able to choose your Custom brush for Color / Mask under Brush Images. Please check screenshot attached.

Just take in mind, as mentioned on this post regarding use of Viewport Canvas with Forest Pack:

"Forest is not updated while painting with the brush, you must release the "Paint/Erase" button to update the bitmap and see the result in Forest."

Kind regards,

[thefox]

Thanks Paul!

Yes. But no. Yeah, works and definitely IS a workaround, even though not too practical. But as long as there is no native function it may be more or less harder to achieve things in general. Seems like there are not too many beside me requesting that feature? Would be like using the comb tool in Max' hari&fur modifier..?

Thanks Michal!

That's a way, yes. Same as above for Paul (its alright and definitely even more applicable than going down the GIMP route (using a mask as brushtip is VERY good!)) it would be great to have the ability to control the edge of a distribution area with some texture for distribution, maybe scaling, maybe transformation and so on. Would see benefint in that. But maybe there's some program internal limitation for this (splines are no texture nor can they be controlled with one) and I honestly dont have much knowledge of things behind the curtain.

Thanks for your effort- maybe one day