OTOY Forums

Is it possible to use Phantom Scatter and its generated CSV file in the Blender Plug-In? The developer of that program made the following post but I did not see any reply to it:

Postby Phantom107 » Wed Dec 03, 2014 3:08 pm

Is it possible to import CSV files to do the scattering, so Blender is fast in the viewport and I can combine it with Phantom Scatter? I have some new features coming up and it would be awesome to be able to fully replace Octane standalone by Octane inside Blender.

This is a real shortcoming! Please look into this, I don't know how difficult it will be, but a CSV file is just a list of matrices that in the standalone, a Scatter node imports.

If Phantom Scatter and its generated CSV file can not be used then how does one do scattering in the Blender Plug-in? It is very easy in stand alone but in the Blender Plug-In I don't see any equivalent scattering or node.

I don't see how this functionality is bound to Octane only - this is the functionality of the parent 3d-modelling application, not of the rendering plugin... The plugin's purpose - is translate the given scene (prepared and given by the host application) and render it. That's it. It's not the rendering plugin's responsibility to deal with the modelling of the scene geometry.
Blender is an open sourced project - so any developer can participate to add the functionality to the trunk. You or Phantom107 are very welcome to do this. As Octane version of Blender is constantly merging with new Blender releases - any new feature will eventually appear in the Octane version of Blender...

So I guess instancing in Blender is done through the particle system, which I’ll have to learn of course. Octane Standalone’s Scattering and Placement nodes are so powerful and easy to use with a generator like Phantom Scatter it would be pretty amazing if they could be made to work with the Blender Plugin.

Any chance of you and Guus Thissen collaborating on that? I for one would be willing to pay for an additional plugin to the plugin