Using a "scatter" plugin to create a city-- Best workflow?

I am working on projects involving imaginary cities. These would often be on non-flat surfaces (like going up a mountain).

So what I currently do is create a bunch of instances of simple building geometry, either manually distributed or with the "scatter" compound object. When I want a "line" of buildings, such as along a street, I use a plugin called PropLine.

Once I have them where I want in top view, I then use the "scripted glue" plugin to drop them down to the mountain geometry.

This becomes less tenable and rather tedious when dealing with very large/complex/distant scenes, however. It can be difficult to tell how exactly they are going to fall onto the mountain with my current approach, and performance can get laggy very quickly with the likes of Propline.

What I really want to do is "spray paint" my buildings directly in the viewport, with lots of control over rotation, size variability, clumping-without-overlapping, flipping, and also the option for billboarding. Whatever it takes not to weigh down an already hypercomplex scene. I definitely still want to add groups of plants as well, but getting a "natural forest distribution" is lower on my priority list. I'd rather have options for "irregular grid" patterns that are more common in city maps.

BTW, I have already tried Carbon Scatter for Max awhile back and it was terrible, causing constant crashes and not appearing to have many options (although hard to tell just how limited it was due to the crashing). I'm now looking at "MultiScatter" and "Forest Pack Pro." It does seem that with these, I'm paying for all the "natural" forest capabilities, which is less of my priority. I'm also a freelancer just breaking into this space, so funds are limited, but I'll still shell out $$$ if I really have to in order to accomplish this goal.

So if you know of a good plugin/native workflow for this purpose, I'm all ears. I'm in Max 2015, BTW. Thanks!

Forest pro is the tool to go. Even if you are a freelancer, it will save you so much time that it is worth every penny.

It main purpose is to create large vegetation but, it is so powerful you can scatter anything in many many ways.

I totally recommend it.

I was about to recommend greeble too or city generator but greeble will create 'buildings' perpendicular to the surfaces, and if there are hill they will look odd.

City generator not sure if it works on inclination surfaces.

I use Carbon Scatter but with Cinema 4D, stability wise is pretty good on cinema, I haven't tried on 3dMax.

Best luck.

Thanks, been leaning towards Forest Pro as well... playing with Lite now, but there are so many limits and I haven't really gotten the hang of it yet, but your endorsement helps.

I do also use greeble on occasion, but yes, the way it works does not suit this need. Also, many of the buildings I'm using are more cylindrical/strangely shaped. Greeble's rectangles make the result look like a "space junker" or "generic sci fi slum."

I also looked into Ghost Town, but the learning curve looks rather steep and it appears to be more for detailed, mid-range geometry rather than distant. Curious if people have testimonials for that one, although I just found a lite version to try out... 90 Euros isn't too bad for what it seems to do.

I've looked at City Generator (or CityGen, if that's the same thing). That appears to be a standalone application, which doesn't really suit my purposes due to the need to get real-time feedback on how the city will look in my composition, regardless of slope compatibility. Also it hasn't been updated in almost a decade, from the looks of it.

Definitely forest pro.