ForestPack: Grid-like artifacts

[kosso_olli]

Hey,
I thought there are some people here with a good knowledge of Forest Pack. I am using it to scatter rain drops on the windscreen of a car. Works good so far, but one thing annoys me: It seems the droplets are placed in a grid. It is most apparent in the normals element. You can clearly see a pattern there. Is there a simple way to avoid that? I am using a distribution map to tell Forest Pack where to place drops, but I don't have any additional options to randomize the position it seems.

Regards

Oliver

[joconnell]

Have you not got the transform controls to offset on x and y? It's definitely one of the falling down points that custom maps kind of switch off a lot of the scattering patterns but the transform randomness still works. Are you in uv mode? If nothing else works you can use things like splines drawn along your windshield picked as an exclude object - they have a thickness setting that will let you cut out channels in the droplets.

[kosso_olli]

Have you not got the transform controls to offset on x and y?

Ah, seems I skipped these. Turned the offset on, with a 50% value of the droplet size in each direction. Now the objects are placed randomly. Thanks for the pointer!

[joconnell]

Hurray!

I think forest when it's in x/y mode makes a top down projection of your scene and bakes all the various maps and settings into a simple bitmap - you can see those orange crosses showing you the extent of your map / spacing area. When you switch to UV it's a real pity that it loses all the scattering maps. Admittedly it's possibly to just mix them in with the map you use as your scatter map but it'd be great if they remained live.

[kosso_olli]

Well, the scatter map is just a black and white image with some streaks running down in various directions to make it look like some droplets have just run down the windscreen. The problem is that the droplets were placed very uniformly in the white area of the map. However, your tip already solved that. This whole ForestPack thing is a big mistery to me though. It's very powerfull, it seems.

[joconnell]

Paul roberts on their forum is incredible - I asked about some very tricky things with Railclone for a job - I wanted to make a street system where I could feed a load of buildings into a set of splines and it'd generate everything with no collisions - he figured it out and had an example in a few hours.