Scatter ignoring pivot

[LucasBS]

I want to put a leave on a trunk of a simple bamboo tree. The pivot is on the tip of the leaf plane, but the leaf gets inserted on the daimn middle of the thing.

I've attached a picture.

I did not look after an particle method because I like the scatter's feature of putting things only on the selected face.


Who can save me ?


Edit:
Applying an reset xForm resolved the issue. Now I want to know why.

Edit2:
Tried to reset the pivot and the working pivot. Nothing.

[LucasBS]

Ignore edit 1
Don't know why, but now it won't sit right even with xForm reset

Any solution ?

[PROH]

Hi. You can solve it this way:

1) Make an object (any primitive will do), and align it with your leaf by pivot point.
2) Convert the new object to an Editable Mesh.
3) Select the new object, and attach your leaf to it.
4) Activate "Elements" and delete all the "new" geometry, so that only the leaf geometry is left

Don't know why "Reset X-form" doesn't work, but this does (just tested it).

Hope it helps.

[LucasBS]

Yes !
But no.
😞

That method indeed affected the pivot (considering the pivot is the issue here).
But now the thing will not obey the "Use selected Faces only" feature. It scatters the leafs far from the tree and up in different heights...
Even with perpendicular on or off, etc.

Again, tried messing with the working pivot. No changes.

For a moment I tough the problem was two vertices I forgot selected on the leaf plane. Wasn't that either.

Tried importing these geometry to a resetted scene. No avail.
😞

Created that plane over a dozen of times on different viewports. Nothing.
Same for the the distribution object.

Finally created a completely new scene with a brute cylinder and a plane. Not even that will work !

Starting to think now that the Max is corrupt.
And it might be: I'm having a bug with the mouse pointer disappearing over menus only, that none else had (no entries found on google). And I've got Max 2014 sp3 installed.

[PROH]

Hmm.. Very strange. It did work here. There is however several other ways to place object on selected faces, most of them way better than "Scatter" IMO. Take a look at this: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/clone-align-on-faces

Hope it helps.

[LucasBS]

That script has no Undo
If something goes wrong I must re-open the scene
And things went wrong: it aligns the thing all miss-angled.

There is an option to turn the object by any degree and direction, but I'm not smart enough to make it work.

But your tip was useful
It led me to the normal align tool, that I didn't even consider existed.

Only to show how noob I am...

This normal align tool so far was the most helpful, but I'll have trouble if I use it. There are about fir or six trees for me to do, and each has at least 15 to thirty of these leaves to attach on every tree and deform it to add realism.

I think I'll downgrade max, cause I need this scatter.

[jeff]

for a manual "undo", use "Hold" and "Fetch".

[LucasBS]

Had to look into help for Hold/fetch
Never heard of this feature before...

A lesson learnt. Thanx.


And helpful too.
Without the annoyance of having to reload the scene, I could mess more with that PROH's script.

Noticed something that is not explained at all on the plugin page: those rotation options are for the base object, not the source. The source rotation is defined by it's pivot.

Now I can see that this script is great.
Too bad it doesn't add variability: I have to choose the faces...

Will definitely use this tool, but still looking forward to fix that scatter, or learn it's behavior (not that I think that this misbehavior is a feature anyway).

Thanks you all so far,
Keep up

[Anonymous]

Scatter unfortunately needs a big overhaul, I don't think it's been touched in a decade. It's missing a lot of useful features, hopefully one day we can persuade adesk to give iut another look.

- Neil