Controlling Surface Scatter on FBX by Surface definition

[Daniel_Ward]

Hi Guys,

it appears to be possible to apply a surface scatter to an imported FBX scene, but the scatter seems to get applied to the first surface material in the scene.
Is it possible to somehow define which surface material in the scene the scatter gets applied to? It's almost like you should have the option to connect one of the surface input nodes from the FBX file to the scatter input, rather than just connecting the geometry output node to the scatter input.

Maybe there's another approach through!

Cheers, Dan.

[jobigoud]

Yeah unfortunately it's a consequence of how the graph network works and at the moment we don't really have a way to pick a specific geometry from inside the FBX (same issue with alembic or any other "scene" nodes). The scatter tool sees the FBX as a graph, walks inside it, and picks the first Mesh it finds.

My suggestion for now would be to export the surface you want to scatter things on to a separate mesh and plug that by itself into the scatter tool. It won't participate in the render so doesn't need materials and z-fighting with the real mesh won't be a problem.