I wanted to share the development progress on integrating Chaos Scatter in Maya.
The first important pieces have fallen into place and we now support the different distribution modes (on curves, surfaces and in bounding boxes).
We support the different randomization transformations, the target/model frequencies, the density textures and some other features.
There’s still work to do, but it’s already becoming usable.
The next release will include our first version of Scatter in Maya and we’ll keep building on top of that in the future.
Here’s a quick demo video that @petya.georgieva put together.
It’s working nicely here and good to see the new icons!
One little tip. if you are using Cosmos assets in your scatter make sure you tick “Flip Axis” on the proxy.
Also if you then scale your proxy, there is not viewport update - this will be fixed in coming builds.
We work in meters and MASH really likes cm. You cant switch between the 2 due to lights in vray being set to evaluation in meters.
would still use MASH for all motion graphics but having a quick implementation of scatter would be best practice.
Can you elaborate on that? Ive been using MASH for scattering but have not been worrying about anything like light measurement settings. What settings in the lights do you need to be looking out for?
I actually wondered the same thing. Maya’s default units are cms, and it calculates in cms under the hood no matter what you set your working units to anyway. I’ve never run into any sort of conflicts or issues with light accuracy when using MASH for scattering, at least not that I was aware of!
Well I found myself in a situation where I imported a CAD building so started the scene in meters. Than built up a complex forest scene with about 15 different Mash networks.
lighting was done in same scale.
On re opening the scene the mash networks where all blown out, so I had to turn back to cm and turn each one off and back on again to get them back into position.
Now if I left it in CMS the lighting would completely bleach out the scene so had to switch back to meters for sending to render.
ok, but if a scene starts from scratch in CM its all good though Im guessing, because that has been my experience so far. The only thing Ive found that gets messed up is nCloth which does assume meters, so you need to set the scene scale in the nucleus node to 0.01, or whatever, to get things working in cm scale. Ive not seen an explanation yet for why this is, but in all my time using Vray and avoiding Maya dynamics cos they never worked for me…this seems to be why.
Are you are referring to Target meshes having displacement on them, and the scatter instancing along the displaced geo? If so, then no, Chaos Scatter does not take displacement into account. You can, however, connect the same map you’re using for displacement into the Map slot under the Transformation roll out enter relevant To and From values and get a similar result to what it would look like if it was taking it into consideration. If you have any tests scenes where you want to use that, I’d be happy to have a look!
If you were however reffering to scattering objects that have displacement as Models, then yes, we take the displacement into account
