Scattering

[Anonymous]

I have some trees and bush models I'd like to scatter on my plane. But, I can only select one and choose scatter. And when it scatters, it'll create another plane with all the objects on it. So now I have two planes: one with all the objects and the original.

Here are my steps:

1) Select tree.
2) Create->Compound->Scatter
3) In the modifier list, set the duplicates to 20.
4) Selected "Random Faces" in Distribute Using
5) Selected "Pick Distribution Object" and clicked on the plane.

How would I duplicate more than one object on one plane (my original plane)?

[Anonymous]

That's the object's normal behavior. Open up the display section (I believe it's called display) of the scatter and uncheck the option to display a second copy of the distribution object.

- Neil

[Anonymous]

Thanks! Works great now. I have another question though. I'm trying to create an outdoor environment... I have trees, bushes, and rocks. I can just use scatter to scatter them all around the plane, but I'm having a problem for grass. I've read two very nice tutorials:

Using Hair and Fur modifier:
http://www.lemiere.com/tutorials/tutorials_rendergrass.html

Using your own grass object:
http://radoxist.com/grass_tutorial.html

The Hair and Fur one looks very nice, but it seems to be uniform throughout the plane. The one with grass objects is nice too, and it also allows you to specify where you want thick grass area and thin grass area (unlike the hair and fur one). Is there a way to make the grass not uniform using the Hair and Fur method?

I would also like to have wind bend my grass, but I'm not sure if bending would work with grass objects. Also, my computer isn't a very powerful computer, and I'd like to reduce the amount of memory used for rendering. I'm not sure which of these methods is best for that... Reducing usage of memory and still have an extremely realistic animation (I tend to get the infamous "Out of memory" error when trying to do too many things).

Anyway, which method would be the best to do what I want to do? Thanks!

I use 3ds max 9.