Sorry for the weird title, but I didnt really know the correct way of phrasing my question...

Say, I have a cube, and I want to have plants on ALL sides of that cube, so top, bottom, side, etc etc...

How do I do that?

Normally, I make a cube, then click on materials, choose eco-system, add the plant or object  want, and 'populate' .

However, this will only make the plants (or object) appear on TOP of the cube.

I've tried many different settings already, but I cant seem to find any option to have the plant/object placed on all sides of the cube...

Is this possible without 'faking it' (as in using multiple cubes, populating them all on top, then twisting and twirling them and bringing them together) !?

If so, please help me out :)

edit: i'm still in Vue5 btw...

In Vue5, the only way would be to create 6 identical cubes, populate them, and rotate them so they look as one, and populated on all sides.

Quote - In Vue5, the only way would be to create 6 identical cubes, populate them, and rotate them so they look as one, and populated on all sides.

Aw ic ic... that really sucks... :(

Thanks for the answer :)

Do you know if Vue6 deals with this problem?

Vue 6 hasn't changed how this works.  Although I think you can now use the eco painting to paint on one surface then rotate the object and paint onto another and so on.  I've not tried this yet myself.

There is another alternative which is to write a Python script to add instances to your EcoSystem whereever you want.  I have a little script that demonstrates this by "spraying" an EcoSystem onto the outside of an object.  If you want a look you can find out about it on my web site:

impworks - Eco Spray

The python guru strikes again!

Wasting time waiting for a program to run. So made a cube, gave it the garden ecosystem mat. Painted upper side. Rotated. Painted that side. Rotated. Painted third side.

So far so good. Plants on all three sides.

Rotated again. Painted fourth side (opposite one already painted).

Strange. The ecosystem plants add to those on the opposite side - the one that already has a population - not on the one I am painting.

There may be some way to control this but have not yet found it.

That's interesting. You couldn't paint all sides, then? What if you give the cube a standard grass material, for example, not an ecosytem mat, and paint directly on all sides, does it work better? Sounds like a report to tech support....I'll try this tomorrow, it's getting a bit late here. Just tell me if you intend to tell e-on about it, or I'll do it.

Thanks. If you want to do more tests then you should tell eon. It's late here and I'm not going to have much time most of tomorrow.

The effect was quite strange. I hadn't switched off the 'grow if over density' icon, so I could see the plants on the opposite side growing taller as I painted. They are the ones at the top in the image - the cube was flipped over when I was painting.

Plants growing bigger have a reason: if you ticked the "limit density" box in the eco painter,  you specified that there is a limit in the number of instances to grow, so the last instances will grow bigger as long as the mouse button is pressed. Vue obeys to your command to grow, but also obeys to your command to not grow over the limit you specified, so it grows bigger instances.

Off topic but - maybe the default for the limit density box should be off rather than on as it is an easy one to miss.

Actually, this happens only when you're not in airbrush mode, and when the grow over max density box is highlighted. But I think it's a neat little feature, because you don't need to use the scale brush to grow some of your instances bigger, you can do it all with one single brush, in a single mouse click.

Now about painting all sides of a cube: it doesn't work, and I should've known. The eco painter creates a "global ecosystem", which means it isn't linked to nor dependant of any object in the scene, it is only linked to the Vue world. Maybe the manipulation tool can help. Still have to figure this one out.

The only things that appear to work from scratch painted on all sides are rocks. This may be because they have a pre-set to be sunk part-way into a surface. The middle cube has rocks painted onto several sides.

With a glass base you can see that the plants on the right hand cube grow on the base (the original top) and the ones painted on the bottom, grow inside. The rocks appear above and below the surfaces.

Other objects seem to behave like plants, vertical in the direction Vue has decided is up. So those painted on the bottom, grow within the cube - the houses on the lefthand cube. Tried to add some objects on one of the narrow sides but they still came out perpendicular to the original base. So I made them Perpedicular rather than Vertical to the surface (slider in Scaling and Orientation tab). They came out upon that surface (top of left cube in picture).

Definite possibilities for surrealism though.

Right, surrealism definitely!

Now about painting, I'm surprised the painted rocks followed your object when you rotated it.

My current guess is that it's something to do with how they act with surfaces - being half-in and half-out rather than perpendicular like trees and general objects. But that's only a guess :)

Hmmm. gotta try with rocks then