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Author Topic: Wishlist: texture / spline / area based post control of RC objects  (Read 1204 times)

Screenscene vfx

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Heya Folks!

Just wondering, would it be possible to bring in some kind of forest texture based controls as a post processing control over railclone? For example I'm working on a job where I've got to lay out a grid of buildings at the early formations of the town. It's based on a grid structure as in chris's previous post but the town is kind of radiating out from a single point at the minute. It'd be lovely to be able to let railclone do an overall layout and then use either texture, spline shapes or some other kind of control to be able to cull / effect buildings after the array is calculated. Rather than having things that'd affect the calculation of the layout, you'd keep the position, rotation, scale and model choice that railclone had made in the making of the array but then be able to use a texture map to modify the calculated results. Things like perhaps a multiplier for scale and density so you'd have all of the order of railclone by then be able to cull density afterwards?

Perhaps the entire thing could be wrapped up in a texture lookup operator where you'd be able to read texture values from an underlying plane and then use the greyscale or rgb values as floats or thresholds to drive other operators?

Cheers!

John

Paul Roberts

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Re: Wishlist: texture / spline / area based post control of RC objects
« Reply #1 on: August 12, 2016, 03:32:22 PM »
Hi John!

Thanks again for the suggestion. I'll add it to the wishlist but it would involve some big changes to the way in which RailClone works. In the meantime you could remove items using clipping splines but I'm guessing you need more control than that. I have another alternative that may work for you though, how about converting RailClone to a Forest Pack object so you can control the distribution using maps? This would involve a few steps:

1 - Convert RC to instances using RailClone Tools.
2 - Use the InstancesToForest script to convert the RailClone generated insances to a FP object.
3 - Add a surface in the Surfaces rollout
4 - Apply a map in the Material Rollout > Get Colour from Map slot. Change the mode to As Texture
5 - Import the DenstityByTint Forest effect (attached to this post). This will allow you to control the density using the greyscale values contained in the map used in step 4.

Here's a little video demo



I should point out that this will only work where full instancing is retained in RailClone. If segments are deformed or sliced they are no longer instanced and will not be added to Forest Pack. I hope that helps out. Please let me know if you have any questions about this approach.

Cheers!

Paul
« Last Edit: August 12, 2016, 04:13:12 PM by Paul Roberts »
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

Screenscene vfx

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Re: Wishlist: texture / spline / area based post control of RC objects
« Reply #2 on: August 12, 2016, 06:21:07 PM »
That'll do perfectly and it's a nice blend of the two. You're a gent, there'll be many drinks bought at the next eue I see you at :)