Love the power of the the ecosystem technology. I'm trying to use it to make very large crowd scenes, and its not quite clear to me how to control the orientation of individual instances, other than by selecting and adjusting them.

Ideally, they'd all come out of the "nozzle" oriented as I please, but that doesn't seem to happen-- they're kinda facing every which way, and of varying size.

I'd much appreciate any pointers on this!

I highly recommend that you read the manual. Your question is basic Vue and well described there. If you don't know this, there are surely many other important things you are missing out as well.

Orientation: tab "Scalling and Orientation", group "Rotation". If you put the slider to 0, all instances face the same way. You can also drive the slider with a function (click on the lightning) and then you have complete control.

Size: same tab, "Maximum size variation", put that in zero and all instances will be of the same size.

But, again, you should read the manual...

Well put Rutra, and very gently.

Quote - Well put Rutra, and very gently.

Scarcely.

I was going to ignore Rutra's response, as it mixed quite a bit of snide in with no information.

I'm scarcely a clueless newb, as my join date and postings would attest. Vue's implementation of instancing technology (which is what Ecosystems are) is unique, its powerful, but its quite different from other instancing technologies, and the manual, which I have read, is not particularly detailed pace Rutra.

Control of orientation, animated meshes, and much more are mentioned or implied in the manual, but not described in detail; to take but one simple example -- [how] can one use an array of nulls to control an ecosytem? This is common technnique for anyone working with instancing in other applications (HD Instance for Lightwave is my reference point, but there are several others, all working somewhat differently from each other, but very differently from Vue).

I was looking for sources of additional information on controlling what is a very powerful but under-documented tool.

What I got was unncessary snarkiness, and no useful information.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2965819&ebot_calc_page#message_2965819

Or you can use any function that you can construct to do the same thing (the usual caveat of having a version of Vue that has access to the function editor applies).

I gave you no information?! What do you mean? I told you exactly the answers to your questions. What did you need more? Screenshots, maybe? If you don't even know how you can use my information, than you are at even a more basic level in Vue than I had assumed.

You say that the manual does not contain the information you are after. Let me copy+paste the manual, page 310, regarding size variation:

Maximum Size Variation
[...]a value of 1 will create instances that are between one half and twice the size of
the original item, that a value of 0 means no variation in size, and that the greater the value, the
stronger the variation in size[...]

Now copy+paste regarding rotation, page 311:
Maximum angle: this setting controls the maximum angle of the random rotation applied to the
instances in the EcoSystem population. By limiting the angle of rotation, you can preserve the
directionality of certain animation effects[...]

So, you obviously didn't read (at least these pages of) the manual, if you insist that the answers to your questions are not there. You ask for pointers, I gave you the controls you need to adjust and the manual. Those are pretty good pointers to start, IMO.

I'm really sorry for trying to help you, I won't make that mistake twice.

Quote - You can control the orientation with a greyscale map, see attached link.

Or you can use any function that you can construct to do the same thing (the usual caveat of having a version of Vue that has access to the function editor applies).

Thank you -- this is exactly what I was looking for.

In my initial post I had written that "You can also drive the slider with a function (click on the lightning) and then you have complete control.".

And in the manual, page 311, you can read:
"If you click the Drive with a function icon ( ) for the “Maximum angle” setting, you can control
the exact angle of rotation that is applied to each instance in the EcoSystem population. When this
parameter is connected, there is no more randomness in the angle of rotation. Expected values are in between -1 (-180°) and +1 (+180°)."