water retention ponds

hello. been a while since i posted.

how do you do retention pond rims? the part of the pond where there are typically rocks, weeds/grass/cattails?

the reason i ask is, i think max gets bogged down with 1,000's of objects in a scene. my procedures have been:

1. create a simple mesh of the rim, the use a scatter script to scatter mrProxies of a clump of grass.

2. use a pfSource for rocks (instanced) or mrProxies (cattails or clumps of grass)

I'm just thinking there might be a better way to do it with fewer objects?

Maybe make a whole pond rim with geometry of rocks/grasses and then convert that to 1 single mrProxy?

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I had to do something similar, only it was more riprap wall style on the edge of a lake. Forest Pro will be your life long friend when doing this. Note, you can't do this with the lite version as it won't respect the Z axis.

It will always be a bit heavy in your scene, so the best advice is to set it to it's own layer and turn it on only when you need it to render or edit it.

Yea +1 on Forrest Pack Pro. I am doing a similar thing on the edge of a creek right now. The other great thing is that included presets are quite decent and for stuff like this you can just select one tweak for 10min and never worry about it again.

thanks. i'll check it out. but yeah i guess it's just one of those things where you're going to end up with a lot of objects. i mean, you could do a cut-out of a thin planar wall or something but that might not be what you need depending on the view.