anyone know of a way to scatter vray proxies without using the advanced painter script, where you can only scatter by actually painting the trees on? The script is awesome and all, but I need to create a forest of 50,000 trees, shrubs, bushes, grasses and such, and its just crazy to have to individually paint them onto the mesh.
The regular scatter tool doesn’t do it?
no you cant use vray proxies with the normal scatter, but I found one on maxplugins.de that does. its one Ive used before, but forgot about. 
Isn’t there a scatter in the blur scriptpack as well?
ya but its called simplescatter, and for a good reason. 
Peter Watje’s scatter utility is working great. Other then not letting me specify a name for the scattered objects before scattering has commenced without crashing max. Its a small thing though.
50,000 trees? What on earth are you rendering, Yellowstone Nat’l Park. hehe
lol cmon, yellowstone has at least tens of millions of trees… this site s .6 mile by about .3 mile in size, heavily forested.
Percy,
your crazy.
You could always array your proxies and then use the Blurscript “random transform” to vary the scale and rotation of the proxies
not a bad idea. ive been doing the scaling and rotation using that blur script.
would love to see the results when you get done!
sure thing. Heres a VERY prelim rendertest straight out of max, no AA.
obviously theres still ALOT of trees needed.
nice, whats the rendertimes like?
i think that was about a few minutes. the issue is the AA. right now Im working at fixed rate 2 at about 20 mins. 3 will probably be all I can afford for rendertime.
Man I wish Vlado would implement material specific GI and AA settings…
any luck with adaptive AA??
Percy, trees look quite good 
With proxies can you only Instance them right… like you cant copy them can you?
If i have say a glass cup that has been proxied, and i want to add say 35 other glass cups to the scene, I can only instance the original hey.
i realise there is no advantage in copying but when i tried it the proxy bounding box went HUGE.
you are better off instancing them
daforce, ya instancing is the only route. your bounding box is huge because the objects pivot point aligns itself to world 0,0,0. You have to realign the pivot to its own center.
Ahh ok cool. I figured something like that.
Thanks for the confimation
not really. theres no real straight lines in those trees, its all small details, so anything but fixed rate takes forever.
alright so I have a question. Im up to 35000 trees and it aint enough, and its bogging down my scene. So i save selected all the foliage and plan on xrefing them into the scene at rendertime. Anyone know if you can Xref proxies? Also will that break the instancing at all?
Ive already save selected them out and they appear to still be instanced, I could render them no problem. I just dont want to delete the foliage in my main file until I know Im not screwing myself over here.