2d Array Questions

[BG2291]

Thought id reboot my efforts with Railclone, starting with a simple model, but still making very poor progress. I need to randomly array several tubular shapes across various planar objects. Made zero progress so i tried doing it with forest & also with multiscatter - its nice & easy to scatter the objects on the planes, but i cannot get the clipping i need (i need to clip the geometry at the edges of all the planes. Tried the new 'edge' mode in Forest but it wasnt "cutting it". So ive ended up collapsing and manually deleting polygons (not so great). Can someone show me how to do this in railclone ? I attach the sample model showing as far as ive got..... (it includes my efforst in railclone, forest & multis). The plane object "REFERENCE.Plane001" has a texture mapped to it which shows the source image of what the pattern is meant to look like. The objects "Rings.Test.#" are the ones i am trying to scatter to a plane shape and have clipped. The base object for distribution is "Screen.Test.RC.001"
LINK
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3533942/Techniques_Test_1.zip

[Paul Roberts]

Hi,

Thanks for the question. This is actually rather tricky to achieve in RailClone because it is designed to create objects using rows and columns and this requires something more like a random scatter or a packing algorithm. Especially because it seems a cylinder should be placed where each ring intersects, which RailClone cannot detect.

Nonetheless I attach a file which achieves something similar by randomising the rings and their sizes and then uses negative padding values to get them to overlap. To create a "scattered" effect I've randomised the vertical transform value.

To create the area I have rotated the RC object 90 degrees so that it's Z axis points towards the surface. You can then extract the surface's boundary spline and use it as a clipping area. As RailClone may give artefacts when the clipping spline is the same size as the surface, I've extended the surface's boundary  slightly.



Please take a look at the attached file, and please let me know if there's anything else I can do to help out.

Many thanks,

Paul


ps. If you want to use Forest then you may find this trick using VRayDistanceTex works and has the benefit of maintaining instancing.

[BG2291]

thankyou for looking at this - your correct those mini cylinders should be on the intersection points but for the sake of the visuals i do not need to achieve that level of accuracy.
From your image it looks great & hopefully i will be able to 'get it' once ive opened up the scene. thanks again.