Dropping Objects With Vertical Planes onto Flat Horizontal Surfaces Help

[post009]

 Hi everyone,

I'm trying to drop a rather large area of grass blades meshes onto a piece of contoured terrain, (I hope you can visualize the scene without me adding a screenshot of it), and can't find the help in the tutorials. I tried using the Conform command, like I've had success with flat horizontal meshes like roads for example, but I can't get the method to work with this particular task. Can anyone offer an alternative to the task that would work with vertical meshes?

Thanks.

[miledrizk]

Hi,

1- Select the blade

2- go to create, compound objects, scatter,

3- Click Distribution Object and choose your terrain,

4- in the Source Object parameters, adjust the Duplicates parameter to add as much instances as you like

5- In the Distribution Object Parameter, make sure Perpendicular is selected(it's by default), this will let the instances follow the faces normals(if you like to have like this, otherwise uncheck it)

6- In the Distribute Using:  choose a style of distribution. Play around until you're satisfied with the result.

[post009]

Thanks. I know already how to scatter say a single blade over a large area of terrain. You can't do that with a large clutter of blades say abot 100 or so (sorry I meant to state). The clutter won't sit perfectly over the contour of the terrain will it. Or would it? I tried with all the settings and couldn't get it to sit properly. I was looking for if there was another method to drop a clutter of grass blades that was already made up.

[post009]

Pig doing it that way. You get all sorts of problems with a weak pc. You might say sorry can't help you with that.

[miledrizk]

Having a big clutter of grass will make it difficult,

Using built in tools in Max, i can only image two ways, and both work best with individual or very small clutters,

Those two are:

1- Scatter which is the fastest and the most intuitive

2- Particle Flow, which is a more time consuming, involving many steps, but have some advantages like using a grayscale map to control the density,

    But also in Particle flow. Now to explain this method it needs lots of writing and it's best described using a tutorial, and there are some good ones on

    YouTube if you like.

By the way the last part of your message "...You might say sorry can't help you with that." was that an attack on me or maybe i misunderstood! :))

Note: I personally, for my work, only use Forest Pack Pro for nature elements.

[post009]

I meant in a light manner, not to offend surely not. I was just hoping for a little more info on how to drop a vertical plane on a contoured surface. Or then a whole lot like grass blades already made up. Then I thought what was the difference. You could just as effectively do the job with the scatter command using just one blade, like you said. Thanks for your help.