VRay Scatter Animation

[THExDUKE]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if I can drive the frequency of a scattered object with an animated image sequence. Imagine a simple setup: a plane as a scatter surface and two identical small cubes as scattered objects. The difference is one has a solid material and the other a light material. I know I can key the frequencies of the scatterd objects in order to define the amout distributed to the total of each object. I was just wondering if I could drive this by an animated texture? My goal is, that the lights turn on still randomly, but within a defined direction. So question would be a) can I hook something in that is animated to drive frequencies? and b) would it respect UVs in order to drive it in directions?

What I already can tell is, that commandline rendering, does not respect the keyframes in the frequencies.

Thanks in advance

[vladimir_krastev]

I know I can key the frequencies of the scatterd objects in order to define the amout distributed to the total of each object.

Are you talking about the density texture? Animated sequence will technically work in the density slot.

would it respect UVs in order to drive it in directions?

Probably if you use a proper texture for transform map and restrict it to take effect only over one axis it may work.

[THExDUKE]

Hey Vlad,

no I am not talking about the density. Check out the screenshot for what I tried to keyframe. But I can already see that neither in command line, nor in batch render and nor in viewport rendering respects the keyframes and animations there. Stillframes are rendered perfectly. And in viewport I can see all changes going on there. But it does not seem to be possible to get this rendered as a sequence anyway.
It also would have been cool, to be able to define areas of "population" individually for objects within the same chaos scatter system. It could be, that each object has its own masks and opacity areas.

Secondly it seems that the input only respects 1 to 0. I tried textures with no success. I could hook in a ramp and drive the color from white to black - that works. but I can't put a texture in there in order to respect areas in UV Space.
That, by the way, does not work anyway like in the documentary here: https://docs.chaos.com/display/VMAYA/Surface+Scattering where a checker map is placed into the density. Again, I could plug in a ramp, but for some reasen, no other procedural texture is respected.

[vladimir_krastev]

Secondly it seems that the input only respects 1 to 0. I tried textures with no success.

Hi, frequency values are not meant to work with a texture from what I can tell. I can animate the value from 0 to 1 and observe the difference in viewport and IPR. However you are correct that if I render a sequence it does not respect the animated values for frequency but takes the one from the last animated frame. We will investigate this further.


https://drive.usercontent.google.com...8mF&authuser=0

It also would have been cool, to be able to define areas of "population" individually for objects within the same chaos scatter system

I am not sure about this. You could easily copy your scatter and use areas.

For now many of the procedural textures do not work for Density texture. We are working to fix this bug.

[THExDUKE]

I am not sure about this. You could easily copy your scatter and use areas.

Hey Vladimir. Absolutely. I can alway get along with another copy of my scatter - but the positions will not be the same. Even if the seed is identical. At least that is what I have experienced. What I wanted to achieve here was a random switch of the objects. Random, but in a defined direction. Maybe my workflow is poor, but so far the chaos scatter is for me the fastest way to get things randomly distributed in a large scale amount. To me it is faster than xgen or mash and it is way more intuitive. But unfortunately not (yet) fully equipped with tools to animate or to detail the scattering.