Creating plants that use ecosystems

#1

Excuse me for pestering this forum. Both my previous threads are related to this matter, i.e. the ability to create detailed plants.
My idea was to make the leaf material transparent, set lea with and height to -100 and make it an ecosystem: that way I could add custom vob’s for leaves and eventually fruit.
It basically works, but the problem is that each plants has to be manually populated in order to create the included ecosystems.
That would be fine if you need just one or two trees, but it’s not appliable with large forests. I don’t see any trick that might do it, so I was wondering if someone knows about a python script that would iterate for each ecosystem material in the scene and trigger the “populate” function.

Thanks for any help and suggestion…

#2

You will need to first manually populate the ecosystem, then convert the instances to real objects using the ecosystem selector.

Just make sure you have dynamic population enabled for the ecosystem materials on the plants.

Most of the time you can use one of the winter trees for this, and not have to mess around with existing leaves.

I created a training product about these types of ecosystems, part of the Vue 6 Tips n’ Tricks series, volume 3. It does not cover larger groups of these types of ecos though.

I am including these techniques in Custom Plant creation volume 3, name still not finalized.

#3

Hi Nick, thanks again for your help. When the Custom Plant creation volume 3 available will be available ?

Isn’t dynamic population a Vue 7.x only feature ?

#4

Yes it is Vue 7 only. In vue 6, i would recommend turning off the ecosystem display before populating, and turning down the draw quality. You can use the material manager to populate all objects with the same material, that should save a little time.

Training won’t be finished until after siggraph, I don’t have an exact date.

#5

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