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Author Topic: Dry Stone Wall  (Read 3009 times)

SS3240

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Dry Stone Wall
« on: January 05, 2016, 06:38:25 PM »
I'm trying to create a drystone wall using forest pack pro. I have a wall object and I'm trying to scatter stones randomly on the object. But I'm not having much success. I want to use forest pack over Railclone to have the stones more random

Paul Roberts

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Re: Dry Stone Wall
« Reply #1 on: January 06, 2016, 01:22:10 PM »
Hi,

I guess how you tackle this depends to a certain extent on the type of dry stone wall construction. If the wall has visible courses where the jigsawing together of stones is clearly visible then the easiest way is to use a similar approach as shown in this RailClone thread, and here's another with a similar approach. This method involves creating pre-composed scatter objects that interlock to help hide obvious joins.



You would then pick the Full distribution map and adjust the X and Y Density separately until the scattered objects fit together. You can use this technique with surface in either XY or UV mode. I've included a file called drystone_tetris_style.max to illustrate these techniques. You can download it from here.



Alternatively you may more of a "pile-of-stones" style of drystone wall in which case you can use XY or Surface mode to scatter simple rock models onto a surface. In this technique you would simply scatter using a Full distribution map (as in the previous example) onto a vertical surface using surface > UV mode, making sure that the Direction Slider is set to 0. To get more variety out of the stones I'd randomise rotation between 0 and 359 degrees for all 3 axis.



You can download a sample file for this here. Of course the advantage of using Forest Pack for this is that you can use Forest Color to add additional texture and tint variation, if you need any more information about this we recommend the Autumn Park tutorial.

I hope that helps but if you have any further questions please don't hesitate to let me know.

Many thanks!

Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

SS3240

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Re: Dry Stone Wall
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2016, 12:51:13 AM »
 Thanks Paul for your response.  The rail clone method appears to be the way to go. Do you still have the download sample from the " Is this possible/feasable with RC Pro?" thread so I can deconstruct it

Paul Roberts

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Re: Dry Stone Wall
« Reply #3 on: January 07, 2016, 10:25:14 AM »
Hi,

No problem at all. I've just re-uploaded the original files to the " Is this possible/feasable with RC Pro?" post. You should be able to get there from there now.

If you have any questions about the style please let me know.

Many thanks!

Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software