The “I have to plant a hell lot of XYZ”- workaround by Anselm v. Seherr-Thoß aka PsychoSilence
We all know that there is the scatter tool... But how about using pflow and enjoying the luxory of fast interaction (exchanging shapes, materials, etc.)?
This tutorial deals with Particle Flow in 3D Studio MAX in conneciton with a little MAX Scripting. And we will plant 44000 stadium chairs with 4 different materials. I will try to explain each and every part so beginners can easily follow. You will need 3D Studio Max (Version 5.1 upwards) and a MaxScript.
Step 1: First of all create a Particle System in ParticleView (Graph Editor > Particle >View, or Shortcut “6”
Step 2: From the “Depot” in the lower third of the window just drag a Standard Flow in the window. (Just in case your Depot isn´t showing click “Display” and check “Depot”).
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This is the Flow we are going to build together ;)
Definetly not the funkiest Flow but very efficient! So what does it in brief?
A BirthScript plants one particle per vertex at a polygonal object. Then we tell particle flow how it should look like by defining the shape, the scale and the shader. In most cases you may want that the planted objects look into a certain direction so I added a kinda look at constrain workaround.
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Step 3:
Before we start to build the entire flow we need to draw splines representing guides where you want to plant objects on. Keep in mind to turn the interpolation steps of each spline to 0 otherwise you´ll end up with a damn lot of vertexes! ;)
Now add a Normalize Spline modifier from the Modifier List.
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