Scatter is visible on objects that are hidden by layer? Is that expected?

[Juraj_Talcik]

Here is my situation:

I have 10 sofas, on 10 different layers, they all share single scatter object. I want to render them individually, so I hide them by layers.

But color my surprise, the scatter is still visibly rendering! Is that expected behavior? And if so, how can I stop this? I don’t want to create 10 scatter objects and hide them alongside.

Thanks

[romullus]

Yes, that’s how it works. Hiding source or distribution objects does not hide the scatter. I’m not sure if i understood your setup, but if you’d create separate scatter for each sofa and place them in the same layer, then hiding layer would effectively hide the scatter as well.

[Juraj_Talcik]

That is indeed obvious solution but inferior because I enjoy controlling the scattering through single master node :- ). If I had 30 sofas and I would like to adjust the scattering, I would have to adjust it 30 times.

Hmm, this quite sucks, I understand how this is useful but it could have instead used some natural Max behavior, like objects set to “Not renderable”, etc.. Or at least have check-box for this behavior.

[romullus]

In theory you could link all the controls of different scatters so that they act like instances of each other except that they’d scatter different source objects, but it probably would be quite tedious to set up and i remember that last time when i tried to do that, the scatters acted quite strange, like they failed to update and had some other issues. Maybe that’s fixed/improved now, i don’t know.

Anyway, you can always submit a feature request to the Corona ideas portal, so maybe someday this behaviour will be improved. Corona Ideas Portal

[pokoy_1]

Yeah, having some control over this (adopt visibility/IDs) from source object would be great.

Similarly, you can’t render masks based on source objects - say source obj A has ID1, source obj B has ID2 and you want to render separate IDs in an RGB mask, it will always render the entire scatter object. Pretty limiting for any useful post production.

[maru]

Do the positions of the sofas need to stay the same when you hide/unhide different models?
If not, then you could set Frequency to 0 (under the list of models) for the sofas you want to hide.

[Juraj_Talcik]

@maru

Do the positions of the sofas need to stay the same when you hide/unhide different models?
If not, then you could set Frequency to 0 (under the list of models) for the sofas you want to hide.

Heh it’s what I do right now :- ) But it’s already cumbersome with 10 layers, and if I scaled this to much higher number, it would be un-workable as well.

[romullus]

@maru

Do the positions of the sofas need to stay the same when you hide/unhide different models?
If not, then you could set Frequency to 0 (under the list of models) for the sofas you want to hide.

I feel this is a good opportunity to remind that the scatter’s objects list urgently needs to be remade. It’s a nightmare to manage frequencies and clustering IDs if the list has more than 3 objects. Really.

[arpit_pandey]

Can you please add your requests in our feature request portal here: https://chaoscorona.ideas.aha.io/

[AramAvetisyan]

@romullus

@maru

Do the positions of the sofas need to stay the same when you hide/unhide different models?
If not, then you could set Frequency to 0 (under the list of models) for the sofas you want to hide.

I feel this is a good opportunity to remind that the scatter’s objects list urgently needs to be remade. It’s a nightmare to manage frequencies and clustering IDs if the list has more than 3 objects. Really.

This is a good opportunity to tell, just in case, that batch edit of items is/has been available for some time now (since first release candidate of Corona 14).
Simply Ctrl or Shift select items and change a property - all of them will be modified so.
This works for all lists - distribute-on objects, instanced objects, include/exclude areas.