I posted an image that I started on last night. First of all I have to say that the replicators work great. However, I did run into a problem. Initially I created the landscape. Then I placed one plant. It was way too big. So I scaled it down in Assembly. That worked fine for just one of them.

However once I tried a surface replicator the plants were all hovering above the surface of the terrain instead of resting on the surface like the original. I looked in the PDF manual and it mentions spacing options. It says these should be adjusted based off of a non scaled object. That is when I figured it out.

So I unscaled the palm tree and they met the surface as they should. But now they were way too big. So I decided to scale up the terrain. Initially that worked, but then it was hard to get started on the atmosphere because the scale of the scene was off now, even though the palms looked right on the terrain, the terrain itself was way too large.

So I set the scale of the terrain back to normal. Then I went into the plant editor. From within there I adjusted the scale of the plant. That did the trick. Adjusting the scale that way does not mess up the placement of the objects on the surface.

So, in short, if you are using the surface replicator, make sure you "model" or create your objects at the proper scale. If you adjust the scaling in Assembly you will get either floating objects if you scale them down, or embedded objects if you scale them up.

Hope this helps someone. Cant wait to get home tonight and get some more time in on the image I am working on. BTW the terrain surfacing functions in Carrara are great. Especially the distribution functions. Here is another trick. When deciding where major changes in color should be, use bright colors at first. That way you can easily see where the areas start and end and how the altitude and slope influences are working. Once you have them done that way go in and fine tune each layer. That can save a lot of time. Especially when some layers are similiar to the next because it can be hard to tell where they start and stop and what if any affect your changes are having.

Message edited on: 11/23/2005 06:53

"So, in short, if you are using the surface replicator, make sure you "model" or create your objects at the proper scale. If you adjust the scaling in Assembly you will get either floating objects if you scale them down, or embedded objects if you scale them up." Not true. Scale the object down and then properly position it and you should have no problems. Also, make sure that the hotpoint is positioned at the base of the object. Here is a quick test of a city. Just testing it and working on setting up a series of default distribution maps I will be selling. (including some city setups)

And another example.

Ok, thanks. I thought the same thing so I turned on collision detection and repositioned the original so that it rested on the sand. At least I thought I did. I guess I repositioned another one. At one point I had a couple of "originals", but since I was just testing things out I only populated the replicator with one of them. Guess I was grabbing the wrong one when I tried that. I thought I was positioning the original, I guess not. That is good to know. Thanks again.

The point about the "hot point" is the most important part. The Replicator uses the Hot Point of an object to attach to the surface. I found the same problem the 1st time I used the replicator. After scaling my trees, they ended up with the hot point where the original had been before scaling... but the tree scales towards the center of the object... leaving the hot point hanging in space a distance from the bottom of my tree. If you move your hot point to the bottom of the tree AFTER scaling the tree, you'll find the replicator tool works fine. :D Hope this helps! Happy turkey day to those from the USA!

Thanks bluetone. Happy Early Thanksgiving to you too.

Wanted to say thanks again to Brian and bluetone. I also had a chance to read the tutorial over at Eovia.net. With that and your suggestions I now understand the surface replicator. It is even more powerful than I first imagined. Donnie

Yes it is! I have Vue 5 Infinite, and C5Pro's replicator has some very fine flexibility that Vue doesn't have -- like precise altitude, slope, and angle distribution.

I always adjust hot-points so the plant base will just be below the surface. This takes care of the problem.

I've loaded scenes with over 20k plant objects, even large mesh XFrog imports, and C5Pro seems to handle it fine, although I did have a few memory allocation errors when rendering. I had lots of memory left, so not sure what caused the errors. Once I simply went back into the terrain editor, did a "Shuffle," went back to render, and all was fine?

Message edited on: 11/23/2005 18:31

Hi. I used the demo of Vue 5 Infinite for a while. I was considering upgrading Lightwave while the offer was going on. I have Vue 5 and I also have Vue 4 which I bought a couple of years ago. I prefer to work in Carrara now for lanscape work. Like you, I do think C5 has the edge as far as easier placement is concerned especially using terrain distributions. I also notice that it handles large distributions with large object files well too.

Donnie

Message edited on: 11/23/2005 18:45

I think Eovia has injected some renewed enthusiasm in the 3D marketplace with C5Pro. I've owned Carrara 2 through 5, and even had RDS -- which I thought was a clunk -- was using trueSpace at the time. C2 - C4 were just ok to me; however, I think Eovia really hit a home run with C5Pro. It has its limitation, but so does any 3D software. What Carrara5 Pro brings to the table is easy accessibility to its very good 3D tools. There are certainly more powerful tools out there -- for 5 times the cost, but about 20% more real capability. I don't want to sound like some Eovia promoter, but I've been pushing this beta for over 3 weeks, and have yet to have it crash! I've dumped it on purpose when I overdid some operation, and didn't think it was worth waiting for an hour to see the results, but its never crashed. Good, solid code and that says something by itself beyond new features!