SCATTERING TIPS

When you are creating huge environments, laying out each and every object at its proper place and making it memory efficient becomes such an important task. The scatter tool in Heightfields is the best tool to assist you in this task. So here are some tips for scattering millions of objects in no time.

USE A HIERARCHICAL APPROACH

The best way to use the Heightfield Scatter tool is to ‘go hierarchical’. What is meant by this? Hierarchical in this context means to start laying out points for the biggest object in your environment. So for example if it’s a village we will start with houses, then we will layout trees, after that the bushes and rocks, and finally gravel rocks being the smallest will go last in the scattering chain.

This also helps you to keep your node graph clear and well assembled.

TAG NAME ATTRIBUTE

This is a really handy attribute created by HF Scatter node. By default it takes the name you gave to the node, but you can change that to anything you want inside the parameters too.

This attribute is super useful for distinguishing points for certain type of objects. Also you can create different attributes for instancing based on the Tag attribute.

AVOID INTERPENETRATIONS USING OUTER RADIUS AND FALLOFF PARAMETERS

The outer radius and falloff parameters on the HF Scatter node are very effective for avoiding penetrations in the objects. The outer radius is how far you want each object from one another. So usually we use the actual radius of the input object as the outer radius. And falloff is how much penetration you want to allow the scattering objects to have. Here a value of 0 for falloff means no penetration and a value of 1 means one object can penetrate the other until the centre.