Forest Pack > Forest Pro (*)

Suggestions for Forest Pack Tips and Tricks tutorials

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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:

--- Quote from: mikegentile on August 06, 2014, 06:43:44 PM ---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

--- End quote ---

+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

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