OTOY Forums

Hi!
So I have an irregular shaped object with an (octane) image based texture (image is black and white). The image has been scaled and moved around with the transform node to align it to where i need it.

This object is also being used as a scatter surface. I want to scatter objects only in the white areas of the texture.

This seems easy, but I haven't figured out a way to do it. I can't seem to use the octane ImageTexture as a distribution map. Only c4d bitmaps work - the problem with the c4d bitmaps and that I can't manually align them to fit the texture of the ImageTexture. (The texture is actually an image sequence, but I don't think it matters?)

I tried going into the Node system of the scatter and attach an ImageTexture with the same Transform input into the Distribution or Scale node but it doesnt seem to work. When i add a c4d bitmap image into that node it does work (but, not aligned correctly).

How would I go about it? Thanks!

Why donn’t you use MoGraph in this case?
The current Octane Scatter is not designed to work with animated contents.
Better to use MoGraph with Fields for complex animated setup.

ciao Beppe

Hey Bepe thanks for the reply!

What I'm dealing with here is hundreds of thousands of particles growing on the surface. Cloner wouldn't be able to handle that, or at least I don't think. The scatter actually works with an animated map (the growth moves with the movement of the image sequence in the distribution map).

I also actually managed to align the c4d sequence with the ImageTexture sequence in the shader. However, I went with a Hair system as it didn't slow down the viewport as much as the scatter.

I have a Threadripper 1920x (4ghz boost), is that really that weak for so little particles? I find myself often get bogged down by an amount of particles (tens of thousands) that seems to be not that big compared to the upper-end standards of today.

Anyway, just a little rant. Thanks again Bepe!

Quick question...have you tried using a layer, then inside that having your image sequence. You can then place a C4D transform in here to match your Octane Transform. Should all line up...

Hey Aaron, yeah that's what I tried doing before posting, but at first I couldn't manually align them perfectly together. But eventually I managed to do it as I realized I did 2 things wrong. Maybe it'll help others who are facing same issues:

1. As soon as I added the transform layer in the c4d shader, the live viewer blurred the image which made it impossible to match them. After a few minutes of fiddling, I realized that, of course, it's because the texture preview size was set to default instead of a higher resolution.

2. The image sequence I had was rendered at 25 fps while my project was at 30. But here's the thing I didn't know - in the ImageTexture, no matter what FPS you put in the animation tab of the image, it'll match it to the project's FPS. However, the c4d shader uses whatever you input in the animation tab of the bitmap. So even tho both were set at 25 FPS in their respective animation tabs, one was running at 30 while the other at 25. Took me a good 30 minutes to figure out they were simply running at different speeds and howto fix that.

Once I fixed these two issues, aligning them was pretty straight forward (similar inputs in the Z+X transform nodes, just some were negative some were positive)