Phantom Scatter [1.12.2] Export and press CTRL+V in Octane! Tweet

[deadakos]

I can't "see" the first image attached to the last update post. However the second one is quite impressing.
I'm currently on my vacation, but I'm working on a project of a small vinery where I should modell the grass also, and I'm not satisfied with the result of the used spray tool in sketchup.
Unfortunatly I can't post pre-render image this post to show the problems, but I will.
I'm awaiting to test/buy your solution.

[Zay]

Exporter from Poser and I believe Daz Studio too are not modeling programs, and export objects the content creators have made their OBJ's in. Usually quads but can of course in theory be anything within the OBJ standards.

[face_off]

Phantom - nice work so far. I know Poser and ArchiCAD can have any number of vertices per polygon (I've seen 36 sided polys in ArchiCAD). I think Revit exports 3 sided only, although won't export OBJ - users would export DXF and have to convert to OBJ using another app. Rhino exports 3 or 4 sided polys.

2 more suggestions:
- Option to have a minimum distance between instances
- Option to not randomly distribute, but place in a grid-like fashion (ie. X rows by Y columns)

Paul

[r-username]

will this be windows program or java applet and can we pre-purchase to be part of the beta testing?

[Phantom107]

face_off, very good suggestions. I will look into supporting these features in the future. As for the OBJs, I don't have access to the mentioned software so I can't create OBJs with them. If users would like to have support for anything outside of SketchUp TIG exporter OBJs, they should sent me some OBJs so I can take a look and hopefully support them.

r-username, the program is made to run on Microsoft Windows. There's two executables and they use DirectX9.0c. So pretty much any Windows machine will do. Technically I could make a Mac OSX version too but I don't have a Mac myself so there's no way I can properly test for that platform. Originally I wanted to do a public beta but I've already tested it a lot myself. I think the main problem right now is OBJ support but I rely on other people sending me OBJs to test. So far I received nothing...

I've started writing the guide about the software. When it's done to a reasonable degree you guys can take a look and hopefully give some feedback. The guide will go deeper in the usage of the program itself. Hopefully it will make everything clear.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone!

Here is a render to show how the scatter instanced follow the pre-defined noise image:



As you can see there are 3 different scatter objects used on this 1 material.

[face_off]

Just another thing to keep in mind....the topography mesh exported from ArchiCAD or Revit will not be in the range -1, -1 to 1,1 for UV coordinates. If will instead have absolute dimensions (ie. metres). Attached is the sort of thing that exports from ArchiCAD.

A further complication is that the Revit plugin will convert scene dimensions from inches to Octane metres. So position 100, 100 in Revit will be 2.5, 2.5 in the Octane plugin - so the transform part of the instance may need to be scaled. The easiest way would be to simply have a "scale" parameter which defaults to 1, and the user can work out the correct scale factor depending on their export settings.

Also highlighting something else to watch out for....if a user exports from a package like Revit via FBX, then converts to OBJ, the scene origin will change (the FBX exporter repositions the origin to the midpoint of the scene geometry). Not sure how many other packages do that.

In general I would have thought most users of your instancing solution would be architects wanting to place trees/grass - so they will be using SketchUp, Revit, ArchiCAD, Microstation, Rhino etc. Users of 3ds, C4D, Lightwave, Modo etc would potentially use the in-build instancing solutions of those packages.

Paul

[smicha]

Phantom,
Great improvements. As for triangulation of objs - can you code such functions in your plugin to triangulate objs as it is used in SketchuUV plugin, which I use a lot to avoid multiplying same texture on e.g., spherical objects after exporting the model to Octane (using TIG's exporter). Or are you saying that objs must be triangulated before your plugin is used?

2. I've been thinking about 3d random generation for scatter data. Namely, let's say I want to generate piles of stones. I can code such generator in R (what I usually do for statistical, simulation analysis using famous R, r-project.org, which is free, or my favorite Gauss soft. from aptech, commercial though). The problem might be to set distances for stones of different size, additionally rotated and randomly scaled to avoid their overlapping. What do out think?

[Phantom107]

Update

The concept of the manual can now be downloaded:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nxmxwrhokdv4w ... ONCEPT.pdf

I hope this clears up how the program works. Feedback is appreciated, as always.

face_off (Paul),

1. The software will not do anything with the UV data. It works with the positions and normals of the vertices. I think this is the best approach. So whatever your UV might be, you can still scatter.

2. You make a good point with the scaling of the transforms. Octane works in meters right? Because my software also works with meters. I'll add a function to be able to let the user scale to meters in Phantom Scatter Compute.

3. Changing the origin won't be a problem. It detects the individual triangles which can be placed anywhere. People should place a "Placement" node in Octane Render to correct this origin change if need be. And if that doesn't work, I can always make an origin-displacement feature to make the scatter data account for the change in origin. But I'll wait with this until people can't get around this problem.

4. Is that ArchiCAD terrain scaled to meters? I'm getting these weird circles all over it. And it looks like it's rotated 90° too. Making this program compatible with all these different OBJs is going to be more difficult than I thought.

smicha,

1. Right now OBJs have to be triangulated before they can be imported in the program. I can probably work something out to triangulate them myself upon importing in a later stage.

2. I'll think of how to deal with this. Currently I do not have a solution, but a lot is possible... I don't think the overlapping will be that much of an issue.

[r-username]

video user guides work quite well, one quickstart and one in-depth. in any case i would make it available for purchase and refine with user feedback.

[face_off]

4. Is that ArchiCAD terrain scaled to meters? I'm getting these weird circles all over it. And it looks like it's rotated 90° too. Making this program compatible with all these different OBJs is going to be more difficult than I thought.

Yes, meters, so the circles will be your rayepsilon being too low. ArchiCAD terrain (topography) is very large polygons (might be 10m x 5m x 7m).

It's not rotated, but in a different axis system. ArchiCAD, Revit, Inventor, Rhino, plus anything else that design people use have the Z axis up/down rather than the Y axis. I have worked out how to convert the translation and scale parts of the transform between the 2 axis systems, but not been able to convert the rotation part.

Potentially the easiest solution would be to have a "Z axis is up" checkbox when you load an obj - then have you code generate the transforms accordingly. So for Z up, you need to generate in the X/Y plane, but pack the transform in the Octane (Y up) axis system.

If you want to test this out....download the ArchiCAD 16 demo (you can install it and run it in demo mode where you cannot save a scene), then download the OctaneRender for ArchiCAD demo, and you can export topography, generate your transforms and load back into the plugin to render and test. What works for ArchiCAD will work for the Revit and Rhino plugins.

Paul