I am experiencing a problem and that is when I try to paint an Ecosytem in 3DSMax 2011 with Vue 9, I can’t see the geometry of the foliage but only very small blue dots appear on the ground where there is supposed to be foliage. When I render, the foliage appears but you can see that it’s hard to place and arrange the foliage if you can’t see it in relation to the environment.
Do you know how I can resolve this issue?
Thanks in advance.
Hi there,
Although I have already replied to your private message regarding this question. I thought I should also post my response here to help others in the future too.
First, I must point out that I only ever use the stand-alone Infinite version of Vue and do not use Max either. It sounds to me like your problems might be rectified by simply changing a few display options for ecosystem population tools.
Try looking for the option ‘Dynamic population’ and making sure this is disabled. This can be found in ’ Advanced material editor’ options panel, below the material preview thumbnail. You can reach this via the Ecosystem painter panel. Look for the option which says ’ Use ecosystem population rules’ and right next to it there should be an option which says ‘edit’. Ultimately, you can just double click on the material preview to open the same panel too.
Here’s some useful info about the ‘Dynamic population options’ taken from page 352 of the Vue User Manual:
‘When you select the Dynamic population box, Vue will generate a few instances to let you preview the population close to the camera. Dynamic population actually takes place at render time. But it can be previewed at any time by selecting the Preview button next to the Dynamic population checkbox. The maximum number of instances and the minimum size in pixels previewed can be set in the Display tab of the Options panel. This option is extremely useful if you want to populate vast expanses of land (or even infinite planes). Vue features a number of very elaborate algorithms to automatically distribute a potentially infinite number of instances only on the areas that are really “seen” by the camera. This is an extremely efficient technique for handling very large EcoSystem populations.’
There are also some other options which may help resolve your situation too. These can be found within the Options>>Display Options panel.
1.‘Preview dynamic ecosystems’. Turn this on and experiment to see if this helps too. You would need to ‘re-activate’ the option for ‘Dynamic population’ in the material editor again for this to be of any use though.
Hope that helps and all the best,
J
I am having these problems too, except I am not even getting blue dots. When I have the ecosystem paint panel up and hover over my terrain I get a “very” small red brush which doesn’t change size even with altering the brush size values. Clicking and painting does nothing with this it seems. Could it be something to do with scene units scale ? I don’t know !
RLM’s suggestions for painting an ecosystem do work but are based upon using the Infinate version, not XStream in 3ds Max.
I am wondering if I can perhaps export the whole lot into Max afterwards but I am not sure and this is not ideal. I would really like to see what I am doing in Max !
When I look for the display settings tab in the options menu in XStream in Max it is not there, only a general tab and render settings tab. I’m not sure if you have to access these menus another way or if they simply don’t exist in Xstream.
The preview button is grayed out next to the Dynamic population checkbox so that doesn’t work either.
Just wondering if you ever figured this out ?
HELP !!
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