Instancing sample scenes

[jonah.friedman]

Hello all,

Here are some instances example scenes to show how instancing works. This first release does not target world building but it is indeed possible to get started, and instancing is a very useful thing to have, so we thought we'd provide some examples scenes to help people get started. 

instancing_1_basic shows using a mesh as the source of instances, placing an instance of a couple pieces of geometry at each vertex. It also has a simple instance selection built in and randomized scale. 

instancing_2_flowers scatters onto a landscape, randomizes orientations along the normals, and does some more advanced instance selection. It uses the compound "scatter_points", which requires the rebel pack. The rebel pack can be downloaded here: https://area.autodesk.com/downloads/all/compounds/

Also in this example is a weighted random selector that selects instance shapes based on some percentage of foliage, white flowers, and red flowers. There is also another one that selects based on a noise function, which is modulated with an f-curve. 

Documentation for instances is here: http://help.autodesk.com/view/BIFROST/ENU/?guid=Bifrost_Common_create_instances_of_geometric_objects...

I'll also be happy to answer any questions. 

[Christoph_Schaedl]

I have to take a closer look on this one.

This is really interesting. We need more of this kind.

Cheers

Oglu

[Christoph_Schaedl]

Would be interesting to get this combinded with the world building node from MASH.

Some seed based growing nodes would be good to have in bifrost.

[mspeer]

Hi!

You can combine this as you can feed particles from Maya into Bifrost Graph.

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I've been yet unable to get the instances from these sample scenes to actually render. Thoughts? I've tried both arnold and vray so far.

[jonah.friedman]

These can render with Arnold, but you need a new enough version of the Maya Arnold plugin (MtoA), minimum version 3.2.2. 

After that compatibility should be very broad - any version of Bifrost we release should work with any MtoA after 3.2.2. If this changes we'll say so in release notes. 

VRay does not support Bifrost yet - we need to get our rendering SDK into shape so that we can interoperate with third-party renderers. 

[MayaGuru]

1. Kindly remove this Rebel pack option and make compounds a by default in Maya -Bifrost.

Its very tedious to install updates and features packs in different locations.

Let there be only one Bifrost Downloadable package.

[jonah.friedman]

Hi MayaGuru,

I've attached a version without that dependency to this post. 

To explain why the rebel pack exists, it's because compounds that come with the main builds come with certain support implications that we're not ready to make with the Rebel Pack compounds. It allows us to get experimental or stopgap compounds out there for workflows that are not yet a focus. 

[Anonymous]

Hey Jonah, can you give me some tips on what nodes I should use to scatter points along a curve?  i want to instance geometry along a curve. I've tried dragging a path into bifrost and hooking that into 'scatter points' but that doesn't work. I've also tried connecting the out points of the path directly into  'set_instanced_geometry' but that didn't work either.

Thanks

[t_chanma]

Hi @Anonymous,

Check out Aslan's Curve to Board compound / script.  Sounds like it's what you're looking for: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/bifrost-forum/curve-to-bifrost-board/td-p/8962186

Here's a hastily modified version with instanced cubes to act as a starting point. 

[Anonymous]

Yes that's exactly what I need.  Thanks for the tip! 

Is bifrost going to work with curves in a friendlier way in the future?  It seams like there should be a better way than this to simply get points positions from a curve.  

[jonah.friedman]

Yes, absolutely. As far as geometry goes, we currently only support meshes in or out of Bifrost. We definitely want to open that up to include more geometry types, especially curves.