Scatter & Displacement

[pingus]

Hello !
Great work for Vray6 release ! So much things to tests

I've tested the new scatter tool and it could nearly replace the itooForest tool.

One of the last thing that i didn't manage to do is a scatter on ground with displacement (VrayDisplacementMod)

Here's a simple setup :
- plane + vrayDisplacement with shift
- scatter teapots on it



Any idea if this feature will be supported one day ?
Thanks !
-p-

[^Lele^]

Conceptually difficult, as the displacement is calculated at rendertime (particularly for per-pixel edge lengths.).
The differences with the viewport would be potentially so big that the distribution, and number of instances, wouldn't match at all, while calculating the whole displacement while not rendering could easily eat into a user's RAM and/or kill a GPU trying to display the results (it'd work for smaller situations, not universally.).

The trick to use is to add a viewport-only max displacement (and a viewport only subdivide if that is needed) matching the v-ray displacement, and scatter on that. At rendertime there'd be at least some match with the V-Ray generated one (i think fPro shares the same limitations.).

[pingus]

Hello Lele

I can understand that the workflow is not standard but now VrayDisplacement is everywhere and it is something that we can't do without.
It's a key feature for high end animation

Forest has integrated an effect section to make it possible




It doesn't seems that munch complicated to me computationally once we have UV's, displacement amount & shift and it looks like just a shift on a Z transform .

Thanks
-p-

[^Lele^]

I see what they do: they don't build the surface at all, just sample the texture.
I wasn't aware of this at all, it's indeed quite clever, you have definitely a point.

[mathieu_boch]

Hello,

To have z offset on the scatter, i find an issue :
just instance the same map in the Z Translation and in the vray Displacement modifier , with same values about amount.

But in my workflow, I use Triplanar texture to adujst some details with a good flexibility. And the vray scatter don't allow it yet.

Thanks