Edit: Reached my bandwidth limit on my domain. D’oh! The links should work now, though the downloads might take a while - they’re hosted on RapidShare (thanks muzzy).
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Hi all
Here are some plants and things to add to exterior scenes. I think they’re all public domain, I certainly didn’t pay for any of them. Hope they’re useful to someone:
A couple of the trees are my own, created with the L-System plugin from BlurStudios. A couple of the others were generated with the foliage widget in Viz, and the rest are xFrog converted to Max - they were giveaways on a magazine CD, I think. The birch tree is definitely L-System, of the others, I disremember which is which!
The flowers were from various free websites - for non-commercial use, of course*. The birds are my own - each one is animated flapping its wings - if you’d care to give each a path to follow, they work great in fly-bys (pun intended). I think there’s a sample script somewhere for random flocking along a path, I’d have to dig it out…
ive got a scale problem. i usually keep max scale units to 1unit = 1inch. this is all done with 1 unit = 1mm when i import into my scene the scale gets way screwed out of proportion and when i try to change the unit scale inside (eg the flock) the birds are approximately 35feet in length and need to be seriously scaled down. now the problem with scale is that vray ive heard will still calculate the light interacting with the object as though it were 100% so light bouncing from one surface on a 35foot object might not make it to another surface in the same object. is this correct? and if so how do i fix this for the flock? and trees etc. they are all too large. normally i convert to editable poly , merge all into one shape and scale the vertext this way the object remains at 100% however the object is smaller
I didn’t know that about VRay! I’ve never had any problems with scale. But for this instance (a still?), I’d say ungrouping the flock then deleting the animation keys and attaching each of the birds into one object should work. Then if you go into sub-object --> vertex mode, you should be able to scale them as you wish and the object itself will still be 100%.
An alternative would be to scale down the flock object, then attach it to say, a box, them delete the box through sub-object --> vertex. If you select the box first, the flock will inherit its scale and pivot etc.
If you want to do an animation, then I think you’ll have to delete all but 1 bird then start again
Sorry, Elf, I didn’t think of that. 35ft birds! Hope they’re not carrying bird flu…
…in fact, now I think of it, I’ve been feeling peckish all day…
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I’m at home now and have no access to the flock scene, which I did a long while ago, btw.
However, from memory, the flapping wings is done through morph targets. I think it only took me 20mins or so to create the flock from a single bird, so you could probably do the same:
Ungroup the flock.
Delete all but 1 bird.
Scale the remaining bird through whatever method you like.
Make 4-6 or so COPIES of the bird, and move the keyframes of each COPY 1 or 2 steps so that no 2 birds are in the same position at the same time.
then
For a still:
Create however many INSTANCES of each bird you need, placing them randomly in your scene.
For an animation:
Create a (similar) path for each COPY, then use the sample script that comes with Max for flocking, which works on a single object, and creates copies itself. The script randomises the initial path slightly for each copy, if I remember correctly.
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I could have gotten some of that wrong, my memory’s not what it was. These days it’s like errrr…y’know, a thingy
After scaling an object you should use “reset xform” utility and collapse it to the base this will get it back to terms with the world, another option is to scale the object in a subobject mode.
