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

[p3taoctane]

Cool thanks mate

[Phantom107]

It's coming to me that I need everyone using PS a quickstart. I think I'll start making some nice presets and weblinks to good models.

[p3taoctane]

That sounds like a sweet idea man

Thanks

Peter

[Phantom107]

Draw distance is now added for 1.5!

Basically how this works is that you should move your camera inside Phantom Scatter to somewhat match your camera position in your Octane scene, then export the scatter. From that position, instances will be gradually scaled down to 0% at the maximum draw distance. Instances beyond that distance will not be exported.

Should come in very handy on demanding scatters like grass. Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to make the material change over distance in Octane, so help me get this added right here: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 04#p192404

[Phantom107]

Another new function, preview visibility, has been added!

This allows you to visually disable a scatter object from the preview inside PS.

For example: if you are scattering grass around at a very high density, it can tremendously increase smoothness if you just hide such scatter object from the preview.

[rappet]

Draw distance is now added for 1.5!

Basically how this works is that you should move your camera inside Phantom Scatter to somewhat match your camera position in your Octane scene, then export the scatter. From that position, instances will be gradually scaled down to 0% at the maximum draw distance. Instances beyond that distance will not be exported.

Should come in very handy on demanding scatters like grass. Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to make the material change over distance in Octane, so help me get this added right here: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 04#p192404

Very interesting adding! Another smile on the faces of scatterfans

[resmas]

Hello mate, I have been very busy, but just stopped here to say.....

Damm that looks amazing.

Great Work mate.

As I said before I will be a buyer. Just don't have the time now...as license is per year, I don't want to buy now and don't use it for a few months...

But it looks AMAZING.

Best off luck.

cheers
resmas

[deadakos]

Hello Guus and every other scatterfuns!
I'm working on a rainy scene which is a semi personal project as always, and I tried to use PS's ray scatter feature to achieve the desired effects. I have several suggestions to improve the ray scattering method, and I would like to ask your help and criticts and comments too. First the suggestions:
- in my scene the obj contains the terrain arround the building and it is much larger than the building itself (because of the surrounding trees) which results a lot of useless rain drop scatters arround the building. I suggest you to allow the user to use negative XY-margin to allow him/her to restrict (decrease) the ray scatter effect.
- basically PS creates two csvs, one for rain drops, and one for rain impact points, which is great of course, but the actual workflow prevents me to use different impact meshes becuase this way I can only play with the size of the impact meshes and not with their form. It also seems to me that the pattern of the impact points doesn't change when I reload the scene or I change something in the settings, so the points of the impact is always the same for me (Of course if I increase the number of rays, new impact points are revealing, but the location of the first 500 remains the same). I would like to ask you to create an option for the user - just like in case of the simple scattering method - where something changes the randomness of the impact points of the rays.
- it would be great if I may exclude materials from ray scattering. For instance I don't want to create rain impact points on the ground where I will scatter grass, just on my rooftop, which will be seen on the rendered picture.

Here is the above mentioned scene in its current state. I'm still missing many things and I don't like a couple of things on it, but now I'm stuck with one thing
As you can see the topic of the picture is the roof. During a real rain, the rain drops hit the surface of the roof and the walls and a part of the covered terrace because the rain doesn't fall vertically. I want to create rain impacts on the first 0,5-1,0 m of the left side of the wooden floor, as I expect the rain to fall there too, and I also want to create splashes on the wooden facade to the right for the same reason.
What kind of material should I use in Octane to achive the humifying effect of the rain drops on the wood? After the drop hits the wood, first the wood became darker, and after a few other splashes it starts to slightly mirror or reflect the surrounding things. (I also can't achieve such "draw distance" effect of the impacts as we can see in the teaser picture of PS release 1.5, but I can wait with that part until I receive the new release.)
Thanks for your suggestions and CC in advance!

[Phantom107]

Thanks for the heads up deadakos! I will work on your suggestions once I have the new feature I'm working on ready to go.

- Negative negative XY-margin will only work right if people center their model. So how about I just implement draw distance? Then you can put the camera wherever and only have rain and rain impacts around that position.

- The randomness 'seed' is fixed to 0 for RAY-scatter right now. I'll just make that editable and that should solve your problem.

- Excluding materials is totally possible. But I will still keep the geometry in the simulation -- I'll just not spawn instances on such materials.

Your render looks nice already, I'd like to use that on my site once it's finished. If you want impacts etc on the terrace you should play around with the ray angles to make the rain fall down there too. As for the wet wood... I have no idea. Messing with the Octane material will make all of the wood wet, even where there is no rain at all. I will look into the material later. But what I expect is that you can combine a diffuse material (the wood) and a glossy one (as a mirror) and then apply some kind of bumpmap as the roughness or something? Also you should chamfer the wood a bit, makes it look better!

[thefishnut]

Hi Guus,
I would like to agree with deadakos on a possible feature possibility. Specifically when referring to the need to incorporate a variety of different model instances to one scatter file. I find my self wanting the create a bit more diversity in the raindrops with different models instanced at random. While the ability to create a randomness to the rain particle positions would be a very useful feature, if the intention was to use multiple scatter files this may create duplicate location of models sometimes. Would it be possible, when exporting a scatter instance from phantom scatter to have the ability to distribute the population number into multiple .csv files. Im not sure how .csv coordinates are categorized, but I imagine this would have to be done at random to generate a scattered split of the points. So ultimately the end result would be, say, 4 .csv files containing all the points (at random) that normally 1 .csv file would contain. This would mean especially for rain particle a different model would be able to be instance for each .csv file and generate a more diverse effect. I image this would work very well for grass scattering as well, reducing the need for multiple exports.
This would also help with the Revit Octane plugin as well, as I am finding that scatter populations above 2000 are sometimes not even working. This is not anything to do with phantom scatter, but probably more the plugin, and will hopefully be fixed down the track.
Thanks for a great application Guss!!