Mental Ray proxies and SCATTER

[SandmanNinja]

I've just been playing with Mental Ray proxies - they seem pretty straight forward to use!

 

=whew= big relief.

 

I was wanting to try to model a blade of grass (just a thin box about 4 inches high, with a blend textured on with two shades of green) and then I made my proxy object (Create -> Mental Ray -> Proxy Object, dragged the box onto my plane, and selected the blade of grass).

 

I select the proxy object and go to Create -> Compound but Scatter is not an option for proxies?? If I select the original box that was the object for the proxy, Scatter becomes available.

 

Am I doing something wrong?

 

I tried shift-dragging the proxy and instancing it to get 10,000 blades in the first column, then tried instancing the entire 10,000 proxy column sideways to get 5000 instances of the column (50,000,000 proxies?), but Max is still thinking about it... Memory peaked at about 7 gigs but it hasn't crashed yet.

 

I'm guessing I'm doing something wrong.

 

Can some kind soul point me in the right direction?

 

Thanking you...

[WAcky]

The way Vray users have been doing it is with this script.

 

But seriously, photocomp grass pics. So much faster, so much easier, so much better.

[SandmanNinja]

Thanks mate.

 

I should have googled before posting, but good to know.

 

I've been using a jpg of grass for diffuse and bump but was just hoping to get something 'better'.

[WAcky]

No i mean go down to you local park and take a photo of a large area of grass. Then in photoshop mask it into a picture afterwards. I do that in all of mine that require grass. Like this one

[SandmanNinja]

Hi...

 

Okay, I downloaded the script/extension that let's you right-click and have a new option under Convert To (Proxies). Very handy. It wasn't horrible doing it 'manually', but this is just a simple right-click now.

 

I got it from here:

http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/2008/04/3ds-max-2009-released-mr-proxies-and.html

 

 

I then found out that you can't use the built-in scatter command.

It doesn't like Proxies. But I went to here:

http://maxplugins.de/max2008_64.php?search=&sort=Author

and downloaded Scatter version 1.63 and it added Scatter under the Tools option (right-most button).

Lots of options - random, edge, vert, etc.

 

Here are some teapots with Racing Car Red carpaint on them.

The first ones were done with just dragging and dropping, the last one was done with the Scatter v1.63.

 

What amazes me is that it does the reflections and what-not and it's oh-so-quick!

Car paint is a fairly complicated shader/texture and yet it handles 1440 tea pots - all reflecting off one another - so efficiently.

These scenes rendered in seconds.

 

Thanks again for the info, James.

 

[SandmanNinja]

 

 

 

[Andres del Castillo]

The way Vray users have been doing it is with this script.

 

But seriously, photocomp grass pics. So much faster, so much easier, so much better.

 

Nice script. Thanks.