Учебники

Welcome to the second tutorial in the Creating and Populating Balconies mini-series. In the previous tutorial, we explored how to create the balcony structures using RailClone and simple closed splines. Now, we’ll build on that by populating the balconies with various objects to bring your scenes to life. We’ll use some of the smaller but handy features of ForestPack 9 to make this process fast, flexible, and easy to update.

Download the exercise files here

Setting Up the Scene for Scattering

Before we start scattering items, let’s quickly review what we have so far and get our ForestPack object ready.

1. If you didn’t follow the first tutorial, we’re working with RailClone-generated balconies. Each balcony uses a closed spline as its base.
2. We’ll use a collection of small assets (e.g., chairs, tables, plants) loaded from Chaos Cosmos, but you can use any assets. The only requirement is that they fit within the balconies without overhanging the edges.
3. Start by selecting the objects we want to scatter. Click the New ForestPack Object button, turn on Populate from Scene Selection and set the mode to Generate.

Populating Balconies

Now that we have our base splines and assets ready, let’s populate the balconies with scattered objects.

1. Select the spline you want to use to automatically apply the ForestPack object. If you look at the Gometry rollout you’ll see the items we had selected when creating the ForestPack Object have been automatically added.
2. To ensure objects don’t intersect with balcony railings or walls, go to the Areas Rollout and change the Boundary Checking Mode to Size. This removes any objects that overhand the perimeter of the balconies.
3. In the Distribution Rollout, reduce the Density value to create a denser scatter. Pick a value that ensures that even the smallest objects are well-distributed.
4. While the distribution may look dense for larger objects, collision detection will automatically prevent overlaps, allowing you to focus on smaller object placemen
5. Scroll to the bottom of the Distribution Rollout and enable Collision Detection. Turn on Preview in Viewport to see the results in real-time.

Randomizing Stacked Balconies

Next, let’s address the issue of balconies looking identical due to overlapping splines sharing the same distribution pattern.

1. By default, ForestPack generates random values based on the XY position, resulting in identical distributions for stacked balconies.
2. In the Areas Rollout, enable Separate Sub Splines. This ensures each balcony’s spline acts as an independent scatter area, even if they are stacked vertically. This is not an obvious issue in this scene. But sometimes when stacking areas on top of one another, FP reads them as a series of include and exclude areas. This button tells FP to use each sub spline as a separate Include area
3. Finally, enable Randomize Stacked. This forces ForestPack to re-randomize objects and their transformations for each sub spline, resulting in unique layouts for each balcony.

Adding Variety to the Distribution

To further improve the uniqueness of each balcony, we’ll tweak the probabilities and introduce gaps in the scatter.

1. Lower the probability of specific items (e.g., large or eye-catching objects like parasols) to prevent them from appearing too frequently.
2. In the Geometry Rollout, add an empty object to the list. This creates intentional gaps in the scatter and causes each balcony to have the illusion of a different distribution pattern.
3. By reducing the probability of the empty object, you can vary the density and create more natural, randomized gaps across the balconies.

Adding Random Transformations

To add a touch of realism, let’s introduce some randomness in scale and rotation while keeping objects contained within the balconies.

1. Enable Random Scale and Random Rotation to make the scattered objects look less uniform.
2. I would avoid enabling translation randomization to prevent objects from accidentally protruding through the balcony edges.

Rendering and Final Adjustments

With everything in place, let’s prepare the scene for rendering and ensure it looks great.

1. Render the scene to see how the populated balconies look. The scatter should appear varied, natural, and well-contained within each balcony.
2. Don’t forget you can adjust the probabilities and density settings if necessary to fine-tune the appearance.

What’s Next?

In this tutorial, we used ForestPack 9 to scatter objects across our balconies, making them look lively and realistic. In the next and final tutorial of this series, we’ll explore how to add trailing or hanging plants around the balcony edges using ForestIvy. Stay tuned for more!