VRay Proxy Mass Populate?

[rmccoy]

I am working on a site that has a lot of parking around it. I want to be able to take my collection of VRay Proxy cars and have them randomly assigned to each stall in the lot facing the correct way. Is there any easy way to do this? I have around 2500 spaces to fill and really don't want to hand place them all.

 

Thanks in advanced for any suggestions.

[anton]

Probably the easiest way to do this is to make a few different groups of cars that you placed by hand and instance them around as all over the place so that it looks random. Then you can select some cars and change their color too making it look even more random.

 

If you have some maxscript knowledge a lot of it can be automated and I would go a different way to populate the parking lots.

[beestee]

Here is a "quick" 7-step guide for you:

 

You will need some scripts - soulburnScripts "objectReplacer" "transformRandomizer" and "selectionRandomizer"

 

1. Create a dummy car object roughly the size of one of your larger cars, you could do some minor poly editing to a box to form it roughly as a car so that orientation will be easier. Name the object DummyCar for easy selection later.

 

2. Make sure the pivot of this object and the pivot of all of your cars are located and oriented the same. We put X and Y at the center of the car and Z at the bottom of the tires.

 

3. If this is your first time using the "objectReplacer" soulburn script, acquaint yourself with how it works to replace a few copies of your dummy car object. You will only need to use the Position and Rotation checkboxes for this particular usage. You will quickly notice if your orientations are translating correctly...if they are not, you will want to fix them before moving on any further.

 

4. Clone your car dummy object into all of your parking spaces with the correct orientation. A few helpful tools here may be the array and spacing tool. You can also lock selection(spacebar by default) and use snaps with the shift+drag clone method to quickly fill a row of parking spaces by using the parking lines as snap points for your spacing and the "Number of Copies" input in the clone options that pops up.

 

5. Once your dummy car is filling the parking lot, run objectReplacer set to Replacer Type: Multiple Objects. Select all of the proxy cars you are going to use and click Add Sel To Replacer List. Make sure Position and Rotation are checked, and under Options you should see Instance in the drop-down box and Delete Origianls checked. Now select all of your dummy cars by using the standard Select By List and typing in DummyCar. Click Do in the objectReplacer dialog. It may take a bit depending on the amount of cars you are replacing, and you may need to do it will smaller selections depending on your computer.

 

6. Your parking lot should be filled randomly with your proxies at this point. Now you can use selectionRandomizer to empty some of your spaces at random. We usually use about three different selections to do this. The first third(closest to the attraction) at a low percentage of empty spaces, the middle third at a medium percentage of empty spaces, and the last third(farthest from the attraction) at a high percentage of empty spaces.

 

7. For the final step, you can use the transformRandomizer script to give the parking a little less uniformity. One critical option when using this is to make sure you are using Pivot Point Center and not Selection Center, otherwise, your cars will move and rotate based on the center of all of your selected objects rather than their individual centers.

[rmccoy]

beestee -

 

You are a life saver. Thank you for the suggestion. That is exactly what I was looking for. I just have to check all of the pivots on my cars. but it worked like it should.

 

Thank You!

[beestee]

Glad I could help!