Suggestions for Forest Pack Tips and Tricks tutorials

[Paul Roberts]

In order to explain the main features of Forest Pack in a simple and accessible way, we are making a new series of short Tips & Tricks tutorials.   

As with our RailClone tutorials, these will be created by request, so if you have an issue you would like to see featured, please post your ideas here. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes.

Thanks,

Paul

[mikegentile]

i know a lot of people use forest in the archviz arena
i have some really cool ways to use it for placing homes in large communities as well as placing cars in parkng lots
-mg

[TL1895]

i know a lot of people use forest in the archviz arena
i have some really cool ways to use it for placing homes in large communities as well as placing cars in parkng lots
-mg

+1 for those, both

[jshulters]

I've also been trying to develop a slick solution for populating cars in parking lots, and while it works, it's by no means perfect. I'd love to see an official Itoo tutorial that addresses this topic. 

My basic workflow has vray proxies in a library (with pivots at the front center of the vehicles, and including an "empty" car with a higher probability so not every space is occupied), and they are distributed using the splines of the parking striping (where you need to make the heads of the parking stripes the "first vertex"), using "Custom Edit" in the Tree Editor to be Random, Along a Path (the striping), and Spacing 20' or so. They don't end up positioned correctly (or random enough) , so I usually have to set Center Displ. to 0%, Transform rotation Z 89-91, and Translation X & Y to 5%. However, I generally have to still go into Tree subobject mode to modify things (scooting the vehicles away from the curbs a bit more, remove identical cars that end up next to each other, etc). I've tried different arrangement of the pivot points to get around having to adjust center displacement and to use the Z Offset to move the horizontally away from the curbs, but it doesn't seem to have an effect. The other biggest problem is that 3ds max limits multi-sub materials to 1000 slots, and the Forest material generated with a library of more than 40 or so vehicles chews this up pretty quickly...if I included all the vehicles in my library the materials get mis-assigned so some cars end up grey or with just incorrect materials...so I always have to use fewer cars.

I can attach a max file in anyone is interested in seeing my setup. If anyone has some more clever solutions that require less manual clean-up, I'd love to hear them! Thanks!

John Shulters
Ascension Studios
www.ascensionstudios.com

[Paul Roberts]

Hi John,

Thanks for the suggestion. I think that would make an interesting topic for a tutorial, I'll take a look into it, paying attention to the issues you mention.

Thanks too for the detailed description of your process. I can see that it would work well for many circumstances and I'm sure other users will find it helpful.

Kind regards,

Paul

[IT1371]

I suggest adding (some how) the ability to area exclude entire layers from forest: what ever object drops in a specific layer/s I want will be excluded from distribution.
This way it will be possible to to exclude many objects without ever opening forest.

[CM1251]

Not sure if this would be possible in RC or FP but I've been populating parking lots and roads with cars for a while now but would like to be able to keyframe animate them but have them still glue to the surface.  I know this is possible with CivilView but I've already developed a fairly large library of vehicles for FP.

Is this possible; does this feature already exist; or is it entirely not possible with either plugin?

Thanks!
Tanner

[Paul Roberts]

Hi Tanner,

At present it isn't possible to animate individual cars at sub object level however we have plans to overhaul some of these features of Forest Pack so we'll keep it in mind for a future release.

Many thanks,

Paul

[Terri Brown]

Hi Forest Pack crew,

First off, thanks a mil for all the tutorials that you guys are constantly churning out. It is such a useful resource, and super clear and informative. Hats off and thanks again for helping us master the plugin.

I often have this rock wall to model - the volcanic stone is prolific in Mauritius so it's more often than not included in my workflow. I have tried many different methods to create the wall with geometry, and would love to use Forest Pack in the process. If you could show us how to go about this I would be eternally grateful. (the trick is in getting all the rocks to align in their grouting without leaving gaps inbetween).

Thanks a mil,
Terri

[Paul Roberts]

Hi Terri,

Thanks for the suggestion. I've added it to our wish list.

Cheers!

Paul

[thefox]

FP is one of the best solutions for natural environments - beside various other uses.
But I personally still struggle with really realistic grass fields..
The presets included in FP are good so far, but a even more realistic approach would be better.

If I use those presets on a larger field of grass it looks a little flat and fake.

I created some presets myself to avoid this flatness and handwork might be necessary sometimes too.

There are some ways:

- adding deformation to the ground below
- adding color variation from texture on surface
- adding noise or other variations to control scale, rotation and objects selection
- use FP objects as exclude objects to paint in other FP objects

and / or natural environment "behavior" like

- clumps of long grass at trunks of trees or along stones (where a mowers cant reach)
- or at bigger trees no grass but some dry area around trunks, those even maybe slightly lifted

And such..

Maybe it's not really a topic for a tutorial, but can be - it as well could be some thought for future presets or a discussion topic in this forum about user's tips & tricks.



Niko

[Marko Spasic]

Could you make some tutorial about scattering clouds.
 I use Octane render and in v3 we got support for VDB files, I think V-ray also supports VDB files.
All renderers have day light system but without clouds.
It would be good for nice looking sky 

[amitgedia]

it would be great if you developer guys make some presets like brick patterns, roofing styles, scattering buildings like new york cityscape.. these types of presets are very useful for archviz..

[Paul Roberts]

Hi, Thanks for the suggestions. There are some Roofing presets coming up in RailClone 3, they're not in the current beta, but they'll be available to try out soon. There some cladding styles, mainly planks,  too. In addition there are macros for a couple of standard brick bonds but it wouldn't be too much work to add some more.

I'll see what we can do.

Cheers.

Paul

[amitgedia]

hi Paul,
thanks for listening me, it was just a suggstion as these are regularly used stuffs which an archviz artist requires so thought a suggestion might be useful also in railclone other varieties of fences would also be useful like certain wrought iron railings of different style, just a suggestion though more you know about the development of software and for it to not get heavy and laggy...
thanks again for listening me...