Congratulations to the new version. Looks impressive. Still havent made up my mind if i will add it to the toolbox or not, but i do have a question about the eco-system i figure you guys know the answer to. Can the objects in an eco-system be controlled individually, (placement, size, texture, deletion etc) and how about collision control? Thanx

Size and textures can be controlled individual within the advanced material editor. There's also a switch called 'Avoid overlapping instances'. Actually I get reproduceable chrashes when populating the ecosystem with low density. You can also use powerful functions to control a variable density but, as far as I know at the moment, only for the complete population not individually. Maybe you should watch eon's site, I think a demo version will be available soon. Norbert

I was more thinking about if i can select one single clone of a building and add different textures,move it around etc, without affecting the rest of them, but thats perhaps what you meant. Ill just wait for a demo to try. Thanx :)

No - you cannot manually tweak clones in the eco-system. However, you can control placement in many ways : - with a density function, procedural or bitmap (useful for the shape and size of clusters) - with the help of 'foreign' objects. You can place objects around your scene, generate an ecosystem that will avoid those objects, and then remove the objects. If you want to tweak particular instances, the only solution is to either replace them by a single copy, or maybe by their own ecosystem material (with that particular setting you want).

Also one other point that needs to be clarified. You can create ecosystems of 3 types of objects : Rocks, Plants, Objects. Rocks and Plants will be generated with procedural variations, which means that every instance will be slightly different from the others. Objects are replicated as clones, except if you save a rock or a plant as a .vob file with their own textures. Vue will notice they are procedural objects and treat them accordingly. For the other meshes, all you have is clones with viariations of size, orientation and color. It still works great with thousands of otherwise huge Xfrog trees by the way :)

"It still works great with thousands of otherwise huge Xfrog trees by the way" Now THOSE are the words that give me goosebumps. Thanks for saying em, Agiel.

I have a picture in progress at home with lots of xfrog trees.. I will try to post that soon with some numbers.

The grapevines are custom made Xfrog trees. There are about 6000 of them.

The trees in the back were controlled with large cubes placed directly UNDER the ground. Vue placed the trees and avoided the cubes, giving me open areas for the grass and the house.

The grapevines are aligned using a procedural material with white rows on a black background. Render time was about 2 hours in Final mode and twice this screen size.

Message edited on: 03/16/2005 14:04

Thanx for the help Agiel. You answered on all the questions i had in store.

It read there is a way to place element of an ecosystem where you want, but it seems not trivial, you'll have to use Python :-/ Maybe an Ockham will come...

I found that after a populated an ecosystem with a plant and later I wanted to add larger ones, I just added them in singly. You can add single objects to an eco system after it is created, or before the area is populated. You do have lots of options.

This eco-system stuff sounds like a huge feature. Can't wait to get my VI and start experimenting for myself. I didn't order til Feb 22, so may have a bit of a wait yet. Thanks for all the info everyone! Keep telling us more.

Well, after four hours of leafing through the manual, reading the bits that catch my eye (I'll go back though it more thoroughly later :p ), I can safely say that Infinite has added a lot of options. There are a lot of functions listed in the python reference relating to ecosystems, including locating instances by position, moving them, adding and removing them. Looks very flexable. An example script on the CD shows how with just a few lines of code you can have the ecosystem objects on a procedural terrain bob up and down with animated changes in terrain height (waves). There's also a short (1.5 page) tutorial on how to have an ecosystem populated with spheres and then edit the material function to place one of two image maps on the spheres at random. A bit of quick fiddling and rather than randomly assigning the imagemaps, I was able to put one map went on spheres under a threshhold size and the other map onto the larger sphere.

Is there a pdf version of the manual online yet?

The more I hear, the more I like.
editted when I found the answer to the other question I asked.

Message edited on: 03/17/2005 03:48

Hello all.
Flak, I can not give a good answer, sorry, but...I want to tell to you, I know your fantastic artwork, your incredible scenes, and I know that Vue 5 infinite was created FOR YOU! It is the tool you need. I hope you'll can play with it soon. Can not wait the results! :-)
Sincerely.