Moving individual items to refine the scatter
Forest Pack is fantastic at scattering huge numbers of objects, but sometimes you just want to edit a few items to really perfect the composition. That’s where Item Editor mode comes in, it allows you to access individual items in a scatter and move, rotate and scale them or even clone and add new objects one at a time. Let’s add some trees in the foreground to frame the view and illustrate how it works.
- Select the Trees Forest Pack object
- Go to the Items Editor rollout and change the mode from Generate to Custom Edit.
- A warning with appear telling you that you are essentially baking in the current distribution and removing parametric Area and Distribution controls. Click yes.
- Go to the Items sub-object level or click the Tree button.
- You can now select items and move, rotate and scale them. You can also hold down Shift while transforming to create a clone, just like a normal object in Max.
- To change the Geometry used by selected items, use the Properties group. You can also randomise, reseed and reset the size of items using these commands.
- To add new items, press the Add button and click in the scene. You can either specify the model from the drop-down list, randomly select the from the items list, or use a sequence.
- In our scene we used this technique to add the trees on either side of the camera in the foreground as well as adding one in the midground next to the house.
That concludes this introduction to Forest Pack for Lite users. If you’d like to learn more, we have plenty more tutorials on our website, many of which will be useful for both the free and commercial versions of the plugins. We hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction, stay tuned for much more content coming soon!
