Is is possible to cover the red ball with the green spikes completely using the V5I ecosystem material functions? It seems that the orientation is limited to 180 degrees of rotatation and therefore, will not cover the entire ball (only the top half). What I want to do ultimately is to create a hellraiser type character using V3 and Vue's ecosystem to graft spikes in V3's skin. Any ideas?

Message edited on: 03/29/2005 16:09

There's a thread over at eon's forum about this and it doesn't appear as though you can do it purely using the ecosystem. I guess you'd have to create two populated halves, invert one and join them back together as a workaround.

Ecosystems work as if you 'dropped' objects on your surface. I suspect it was easier to come up with a vertical drop above the horizontal plane of the ground instead of calculating the vertical direction across the whole surface of the object. You could create multiple spheres with ecosystems, turn their underlying material transparent (except for one) and superimpose them. Make sure to set the 'influenceof foreign objects' parameter to 0 when creating your ecosystems.

What about changing the "direction from the surface" to 360 degrees. Looks like yours is still set at the default 20 degrees. I have not tried this, mind you but it would be my best guess.

I tried this and it doesn't work. It just points the ecoobjects downward but still does not fill past the top of the equator -- thanks anyways

I think I read somewhere that early versions of the Beta allowed the eco on all surfaces of the object, but it was too slow so they optimised to just 'top' surface.