VRayScatter for Maya?

[snivlem]

Just wondering if anyone has purchased this plugin and maybe can share a few example renders of what it can do in Maya?

I see on their site very little information and only one or two basic example renders, not even a demo.

(Chaos, I hope I'm allowed to start a thread like this based on a 3rd party product but it is to do with V-Ray still! I see in the max forums there are a few threads like this (Autograss, multiscatter etc...)

[bigbossfr]

Same question here.
Maya haven't great scatter plugin. All existing tools are :
- python scripts which create instances or particles instancer. So it doesn't work because when you have a lot of instance, it is impossible to work in Maya. And the control is very limited.
- carbon scatter : too limited.

If anyone have tested VRayScatter for Maya....

[Morbid Angel]

We are using it right now in production. It by no means compares to multiscatter in 3ds max, but its a lot better then any other method inside maya. There are some limitations, I have been posting on their forum like crazy and they do respond, though not as fast as I'd like.
If you are looking to scatter geometry, like vray proxies (forest), or whatever, this plugin will get you there for sure. Its fast, more or less easy to use if you worked with scatter in max before, if you haven't the options there are pretty basic, like distribution, rotation, scale etc, all can be driven by texture maps or ramps.

At present I have about 15 scatter containers in my main scene, some are for the forest, about 1,000,000 proxy trees, some for grass, about 3,000,000 and some for garbage/debris (ruined city). While working with it is fine, when it gets to rendering its a bit slow, to just populate the entire scene with that many objects takes maybe 20-30 minutes to do a pre-render export. But with that said though, everything else is fine, scene file size is small, and its more or less stable

[iTiunov]

Yes it's working... Even under Mac OS X... Here is ≈10'000'000'000 polys:

[snivlem]

Thanks iTiubonov and Dmitry.

The 30 minute translation time is giving me a bit of a scare though! it's slower than Maya's translation of particle instancing?

How fast was it to translate that scene iTiunov?

[Morbid Angel]

I'd rather let the computer do the work, then do it my self...our experience with planting particle based trees was a lot more labor intensive.

[snivlem]

Yes I totally agree. Although I've written my own tool for proxy scattering that works quite well (surface emission based on 3d paint maps), however if the translation times are quicker for scenes like Ivan posted, then I'd jump on board VRayScatter in a heartbeat! 30 minutes is a bit of a shock to me.

Also, can it also do grid based emissions? Ie can it scatter things at an equally even distance?

Thanks for posting in this thread guys!

[Morbid Angel]

its a plugin, so I don't think its an emission like particles, it does its own thing internally. What I said with the translation time is just because my scene is so heavy. Your average scene is just a couple of minutes.

[Morbid Angel]

its a plugin, so I don't think its an emission like particles, it does its own thing internally. What I said with the translation time is just because my scene is so heavy. Your average scene is just a couple of minutes. Yes it can do distance based position, it creates a collision sphere for each object and does a detection, so no objects can intersect, or they can with another control.

[snivlem]

Thanks Dmitry ,

One last question to clarify, when you mean "translation time", do you mean each time it renders it needs to calculate or is it a one time build to generate where the instances are scattered?

[Morbid Angel]

I believe its each frame.

[Morbid Angel]

forgot to mention that there is an option to use camera clipping, so it only plants objects where camera is seeing, thus reducing the total number of objects in scene which is pretty good imo.

[mr furious]

give soup tools a test... once there are some good tutorials for using their scatter node and adding all the randomness you need. it can be surface and or mesh volume base that is also driven by texture maps and vert color maps.

check out the soup example scenes.

if you savvy you can figure out the nodes to hook up and automate the node creation hook up. it makes a custom particle system that feeds into the maya instancer. just add your vray proxies to the instancer and away you go!

http://www.soup-dev.com/examples2_2.htm

video example
https://vimeo.com/16336958
https://vimeo.com/18522873

[Morbid Angel]

its not bad at all, but I think you would need to know a bit of scripting to make it do what you want. I also wonder how it would handle millions of instances?

[snivlem]

Thanks mr furious, Soup is a good suggestion, but I'm currently finding that Maya's native particle instancing is getting me 70%-80% of the way in regards to scattering in many projects, just seeing what VRayScatter can do better than Maya and for an extra 150Euro(?).