Best way to populate a parking lot?

[Brodie Geers]

I've got a bunch of low poly cars and I'm populating a very large parking lot for an animation.

 

Is Archvision pretty much the way to go? Are there any good alternatives? For example I wonder if there's a plugin that would allow me to place a single object, a box for example, in all of the spaces and then I could run the plugin to randomly replace each box with one of my cars. Anything like that exist?

 

-Brodie

[John Dollus]

File->import->replace works great for this.

 

you can also use the ObjectReplacer script from the Soulburn script collection

[beestee]

Soulburn Scripts has an ObjectReplacer script that will do what you want with relative ease. I have done similar to what you are saying with placing a placeholder box quickly and uniformly, then using another soulburn script, transform randomizer, to add a very slight amount of chaos to the orientation of the placeholders...then of course using object replacer to randomly replace the placeholders with a set of vehicle models, which in my case were vray proxies. There is also a selection randomizer script in the soulburn scripts that can be used to randomly delete cars to represent empty spaces.

 

EDIT: You beat me John

[Brodie Geers]

That's really helpful. One more question. My dosch cars seem to be about 3 times too large for some reason so I need to scale them down quite a bit. But then when I use object replace it replaces the objects with the cars but at the original size. Any idea what's going on? I've try collapsing and reset xform to try and erase all information about what the original size of the cars was but it always replaces the objects at the 100% car size which is too large.

 

-Brodie

[beestee]

I used to have this problem with trees...

 

With the objects selected, click reset scale:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]45404[/ATTACH]

 

If you handle it this way, you will need to clear and repopulate your list of replacer objects if the object replacer tool has been left open.

 

There is also this setting in object replacer that would probably fix it:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]45405[/ATTACH]

 

In fact you probably only want position and rotation checked for this operation

[BrianKitts]

once you fix your cars reset the objects xForm, then collapse your edit mesh that way it locks the scale at it's current size.

[pailhead]

Use xfrom reset every time you're done with scaling stuff. Not sure if you are using vray, but i would also convert everything into a proxy. Place boxes as place holder objects, and be sure to have the pivot in the same place on every car. Actually, xform reset should be applied after you've done scaling and centering the pivot point. I usually collapse the stack with the xform modifier in the end.

 

Object replacer works like a charm afterwards, just do like 10 percent increments or something.