[Q] Edge Mode

[valerostudio]

Will we get the ability for edges, like what is available in ForestPack?

[jiminy-billy-bob]

Hehe, I agree with you, that feature is a killer. I use it all the time now with Forest Pack.

Unfortunatly I don't see how I can replicate it without creating lots of new components. I would have to isolate every grass blade in the patch, get rid of some of them, and make a new component with the remaning ones.
And that would not work with proxies.

For now, I will try to simplify as much as I can the old Forest Pack workflow, which is having big patches for the large areas, and small patches around the edges.

[andybot]

I'm really hoping the vray clipper comes to vfsu wonder if that could be purposed in this plugin to exclude areas. I'm pretty sure it works on proxies in the other vrays, right? Keep meaning to test these things in Blender...

[jiminy-billy-bob]

I would need to see how it is implemented, and how we can access and feed it. So I can't speculate on this right now.

But even if I could, it would be quite different from Forest Pack's Edge mode, as it would just cut trough geometry. Whereas Forest Pack is smart and only hides the sub-elements that are outside the boundaries, so the individual grass blades are not clipped.

[andybot]

I would need to see how it is implemented, and how we can access and feed it. So I can't speculate on this right now.

But even if I could, it would be quite different from Forest Pack's Edge mode, as it would just cut trough geometry. Whereas Forest Pack is smart and only hides the sub-elements that are outside the boundaries, so the individual grass blades are not clipped.

Ah, I didn't realize FP uses groups of parts. In that case, clipping seems a bit coarse by comparison.

[Pixero]

What if it could use smaller patches of grass and auto choose which to use so it fits close to the edge?

[jiminy-billy-bob]

That's a very good idea. But there would be the issue of density. It would have to be denser on the border.

I'll see what I can do.

[JQL]

I think this would imply an effort from the user part, unless you have presets. Your library system could ask user for "linked" kinds of patches:

- The essential patch would be scaled x1 patch
- Then if user introduced a smaller patch, for instance x0.5 scaled you could make the line feature available;
- Then the user could introduce several patches more: like x0.25 x0.33 x0.75... etc
- Skatter would then compare LenX and LenY of all the patches introduced and make a distribution and density calculation, based on the proportions of the components.

This would imply some user input but skatter would do a lot of work automatically.

A thing that would be interesting for me would be that this would allow us to add an extra touch of realism to our projects. Imagine that one of the patches skatter uses on the line position has a different kind of grass, or some pebbles too or has more detailed leaves. Any of these could make the line objects stand out as they are the ones people will look at in contrast with the edges materials:
- Grass is taller against walls;
- You can see some pebbles if you look beneath grass;
- Leaves against a side walk could have 10 segment curves, while all ther rest could have only 3...

There are other kind of uses here but this could be a way of having a certain logical LOD on our projects.

I'm thinking on LOD and will make a FR.

[Pixero]

Isn't there an algoritm that fills a surface area with different sizes circles? Maybe it could be used somehow to choose what grass patch size to use to make it an even fill.

Edit: something like this: http://www.packomania.com

[optimaforever]

Isn't there an algoritm that fills a surface area with different sizes circles? Maybe it could be used somehow to choose what grass patch size to use to make it an even fill.

Edit: something like this: http://www.packomania.com

That's very interesting