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Author Topic: How to create a lot of gold coins over undulating surface?  (Read 1090 times)

Richard Birket

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How to create a lot of gold coins over undulating surface?
« on: March 16, 2016, 08:27:52 PM »
I'm trying to re-create a scene from the Hobbit in Smaug's lair where there are piles and piles of money. What would be the best way to go about this using ForestPro?

I have a large, undulating surface (a simple quadpatch with a suitably scaled noise modifier on it).

I then create 3x individual coins - just three simple extruded circles with different diameters and thicknesses.

I understand that to create millions of instances of these individual three coins over such a vast area wouldn't be the best method, so instead, I have created two little ForestPro clusters of coins, around 0.4m diameter circles.

So...what next? Do I create a new FP object using the large undulating surface as the FP surface and use the two clusters as segments? I have done this, but the clusters now do not follow the undulating terrain.

So how do I get the clusters to follow the undulations?
Kind Regards,
Rich

www.blinkimage.com

Paul Roberts

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Re: How to create a lot of gold coins over undulating surface?
« Reply #1 on: March 16, 2016, 08:55:36 PM »
Hi Rich,

That sounds like an interesting project. You would normally tackle this exactly as you suggest, by nesting the FP clusters inside a 3rd FP object. We have a tutorial about this [img=http://www.itoosoft.com/tutorials/tutorial_realgrass.php]http://here[/img](it's a little old now but the same principles apply).

When you say it doesn't follow the undulating surface do you mean the segments are not placed on the surface or that they don't rotate to follow it? If it's the latter it could be a simple case of setting the Direction slide to 0 so that it rotates to follow the surface normals. By default they always face upwards. You could also try turning on Scale to Sloped areas to better fill the space.



It's also worth checking where the Pivot is on the nested objects. Sometimes they are not aligned to the centre of the cluster.

I hope that helps.

Many thanks!

Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

Richard Birket

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Re: How to create a lot of gold coins over undulating surface?
« Reply #2 on: March 16, 2016, 09:22:09 PM »
Hi Rich,

That sounds like an interesting project. You would normally tackle this exactly as you suggest, by nesting the FP clusters inside a 3rd FP object. We have a tutorial about this [img=http://www.itoosoft.com/tutorials/tutorial_realgrass.php]http://here[/img](it's a little old now but the same principles apply).

When you say it doesn't follow the undulating surface do you mean the segments are not placed on the surface or that they don't rotate to follow it? If it's the latter it could be a simple case of setting the Direction slide to 0 so that it rotates to follow the surface normals. By default they always face upwards. You could also try turning on Scale to Sloped areas to better fill the space.



It's also worth checking where the Pivot is on the nested objects. Sometimes they are not aligned to the centre of the cluster.

I hope that helps.

Many thanks!

Paul

Thanks Paul - I think it was the direction slider.

I also want each cluster to randomly rotate, but when I tick on rotation (just in the z axis) from 0 to 359, it seems to all go a bit weird. Can I send you a scene to look at?
Kind Regards,
Rich

www.blinkimage.com

Paul Roberts

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Re: How to create a lot of gold coins over undulating surface?
« Reply #3 on: March 17, 2016, 09:56:51 AM »
Hi Richard,

Sure, please feel free to attach the scene here or send it to support@itoosoft.com and we'll take a look. I'd also check the the pivot is in the centre of the patches as it rotates around this axis. If it's off-centre you can get some odd results with random rotation.

Thanks!
Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software