Amazing OBJECT Scattering in Blender with Scatter!

what's up guys justin here with the cgessentials.com back with another blender add-on tutorial for you so in today's video we're going to check out scatter which is a great object scattering add-on for blender it basically allows you to randomly place objects it automates a lot of the processes that can get a little bit tricky when you're messing with particles and other things like that so that you can quickly scatter things like trees and rocks really anything you want to be kind of random in your model so let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so first things first you can download scatter from the blender market so and there's two versions in here that you're going to see so you're going to have the regular scatter version then you're also going to have the pro version which comes with more masks more biomes more assets so just a bunch more stuff and you can see the difference i believe you can see the difference by scrolling down and clicking on the comparison sheet right here so there's actually a page that shows you the difference between the two so there's the standard version which has some of these tools and there's some additional tools that are in here like some more scattering masks more biomes and assets just more stuff in general so i'm currently working with the pro version if you don't need all of these additional things you can just work with the standard version but when we start off what we're going to do is we're going to install this we install this just like we would any other blender add-on so we're just going to go to edit preferences and then we're just going to install it so don't unzip the zip file that it comes in just double-click on it and click on install add-on then when you do that if we look right here it's going to install two objects right it's going to install scatter and it's going to install the scatter objects and so we want to check the box for both of these note that when you check the box for scatter you need to go through and you need to agree to the license agreement that's in here so basically what it says is you're not going to resell redistribute the purchased product so you can use this for personal educational or commercial use as long as they don't violate the following but you do need to click on this in order to use this tool so we're going to go ahead and click on this and then you can see all of the different options down below and you want to make sure to check this box for loadify as well so loadify is going to be the level of detail add-on that's going to allow you to use different levels of detail of objects inside of scatter so now let's talk a little bit about how scatter works so we're going to start by adding a plane and then we're also going to add a cube a sphere and a cylinder just to kind of practice with scatter so what we're going to do now is we're going to take a look at scatter's interface and so scatter in its simplest form and let's make sure that we've applied their okay rotation and scale to all of those objects so apply rotation and scale so in its simplest form if you tap the n key there's an option over here for scatter and so notice how when you first open this up the very first thing on here is it's looking for a target and i don't know if you there we go so basically what that means is that's looking for the mesh on which you want to scatter things so for this case we want to scatter things on this rectangle right here so i'm just going to click the eyedropper and i'm going to click on this object right here and so now i'm going to select an object to scatter and i need to pick a preset for how it wants to scatter this on this face so if you click on this you can see there's a number of different options in here that are good for a lot of different things right so there's either arrays there's also like clusters like grass would be clustered there's some simple stuff there's a lot of different options in here let's start by just selecting so let's select like the cluster grass m so if i click on that now what i can do is i can click on the button for scatter in order to scatter this object on that face notice how this is randomly placing this object on the face based on the preset that i had selected and so note that some patterns like arrays require more geometry right so if i was to select this face or i was just select this object then i was to try to select this array and click on scatter it's going to give me an error message because it tells me it needs to subdivide my terrain into a grid basically you need more vertices in here for that to work so if you're trying to use some of the array functions you may need some more geometry inside of your model but for now let's take a closer look at some of our other options in here so you can definitely use this in order to scatter different objects in here that you have off to the side there's also an option right below called the biomes manager what the biomes manager is going to do is that's going to let you basically a biome is a preset number of assets or type of assets that you can scatter in your program so for example if i was to click on this b glass or b grass 0 1 that's going to take a library object and it's going to scatter it on this face notice how this is running really slow so this is something you really need to pay attention to with this add-on because it's creating so much geometry you need to be very careful that you're not creating so much that you're overwhelming blender because this is just creating tons and tons and tons of geometry in here and we'll get more in depth on some things you can do in order to protect from that but notice how what this did is this allowed us to quickly add grass to our plane and so if you look at this drop down you have options for biomes they have things like bushes and trees you can create forests and other things really quickly in here um just note again they can be really heavy so you have to be a little bit careful with that but there's also drop down options in here for using different assets different materials so for example this material i could use this grass material in order to apply a material to this face when i do that that means that now i have this more realistic material under my grass so i don't have like a white plane in here so this is really kind of preset with a lot of options where you can easily add realistic landscapes in here but again you need to be a little bit careful of what you're actually adding but there's also tools in here for like different asset groups so there's different asset groups in here that you can add as well as different layers so let's say that i wanted to add a layer of red poppies i can just click on this and that's going to add that in here notice how my target plane is still set as that as that one plane so see how this adds this in here randomly using the presets that are contained inside of your biomes now you can create your own custom stuff and save it i'm not going to talk too much about that right now but there's a presets option in order to do that so now let's take a look at some of the other things that we can do with this tool so for example i'm going to add another plane and i'm going to move it over here and scale this one up so what we want to do i'm going to close out this manager for right now so i want to apply that scale and then i want to set my target to be this plane right here and let's go ahead and let's emit or let's place let's use the cluster grass function and let's place this rectangle again so i'm just going to scatter this rectangle on this face well now let's take a look at some of the options so the first thing you can do is you can set the amount of emission per square meter so let's say you wanted more of these let's say you wanted to set this to 60. so when you set this to 60 you can go down to your tweaking and there's an option in here for redrawing the selective selected system so i'm going to click on confirm notice how what that did is that added more objects per square area so you can use this to adjust the number of objects that get dropped in here so the creation behaviors is going to allow you to make some adjustments to the way things are displayed this can be very helpful for keeping blender from crashing when you're working with some of this heavier geometry so for example i can set this option where we only show 50 of the objects that are created on creation right here so this is basically setting presets that you can then also adjust manually down below so auto enabling lod systems is usually a really good idea when and lod systems we'll talk about a little bit later those are basically proxies so they're low polygon things that allow you to see where the objects are without necessarily having to draw all of that geometry what we're trying to avoid is we're trying to avoid having all this geometry in your blender viewport but it'll still show up in a render so we'll talk a little bit more about that in a little bit but these are basically going to be the behaviors that you can set when things are created so in addition security actions is the same thing this is again trying to keep blender from crashing because we create too much geometry so for example what this is going to do is this is going to basically let you set the number of polygons that can be created before this starts taking measures in order to not show that full geometry so our statistics sheet is going to allow us to see how much geometry is created in each one of these objects so for example you can see that there's a lot of geometry in this grass layer right right now and you can you can turn these off in your display viewport using this function so these would still show up inside of your rendering but they're not going to show up inside of your viewport so you can use this to really help your performance again so pay attention to your statistics that's going to be really important and then now let's take a look at some of the settings that we have in here so for example if i was to select this object you can see how this shows me the object for the cluster grass that we placed on this face right here so if we were to go back to our first plane and then look at this you can see how our tweaking is going to have all of the different scatter instances that we ran on this face so you can use this in order to adjust different scatter planes so we're going to go back to this one for right now take a look at some of the options that are in here so you can use this to redraw if you make changes as well as deleting selected systems if you decide you want to do that so for example if you wanted to on this one delete let's say the red poppies you could just come in here you could just click on this click on the button for delete systems and you can see i was able to easily delete out those red poppies right here so you can manage all of those things in the tweaking function so there's also some tools in here for selection and duplication as well as renaming if you want these to be renamed so for example this one is going to be my scattered boxes so i can just call this boxes so you can use this to basically uh manage all the different scattering systems that you have in here you can also click these buttons right here to turn things off in active display and also in the rendered viewport so if you don't want them to show up in a rendering or in your display you could turn both of them off just by clicking on this so now let's take a look at some of the scattering options that we have down below so let's go back to our squares so we're going to click on this right here and underneath tweaking there's an option for scattering that you can click on and so the first thing you can do is you can adjust your display percentage so basically what that means is that means you can create more geometry than you show so if you want to create this but you only want to see half of it that's going to make your computer run a lot faster by turning that display percentage down so down below the particles function is where you can adjust how many of your objects are created how they're created other things like that so for example if i move this to the right and let's turn our display percentage back on i can turn my number of objects that are emitted up or down by either typing in a value or clicking and dragging so you can adjust other things in here as well so like your seed for example is going to adjust just kind of like where these are located so you can really kind of do a lot with this you can also just click on random in order to try different things that's basically just kind of setting the clustering initial locations that this is using to calculate this so the other things you can do is you can adjust your particle scale so you can kind of randomize that if you don't want things to be all the same remember that this gets a lot more important when you're dealing with things like grass and rocks and things that are truly random but you can also set the xy location or rotation so let's say for example that you don't want things to be just kind of like straight along here you can use this in order to randomly rotate those as well so you can kind of play around with these in order to see what kind of results you can get you can see how this is a very powerful tool for simulating scattered objects inside your models so you can also set these these are basically your particle settings that you would find if you were setting up a particle system over here but you don't have to do any of that setup this automates the whole thing for you all right so children down below basically what that means is that means you can enable this in order for each one of the objects that are placed in order to have a child object so you can use this in order to create more objects based on the placement of the initial objects and notice how you can set this where you could have a lot more children in your rendering than you do in your display and again all of this is a performance saving feature so you could also adjust the way that those objects kind of clump together so you can see how this is really easy to change so it could be really good for things like grass especially in other vegetation so i'm going to turn that back off down below instances what instances does is this allows you to manage the things that are included in your scatter so for example notice how right now this is all scattered boxes well if i was to go over and select this object right here and then and we'll pay attention to this over here if i was to click on add selected objects to collection notice how now this is including not only my boxes but also my spheres so i can use this in order to include spheres in here and i can do that for multiple different things so if i was to select my cone i could add that as well well now i have cones i have boxes and i have spheres in my scatter so you can also replace these with bounding boxes so if you don't want to show all the geometry in here you can click on this button right here to replace them with bounding boxes so now you have all your objects scattered but they're not actually showing all of that geometry in here so again it's a very powerful performance saving option you can also remove these just by clicking in the button right here all right so now let's talk a little bit about level of detail and so we'll go ahead and let's create a new example so i'm going to do a shift a add a plane i'm going to scale it up delete my default model and we will apply our rotation skip so let's say that we wanted to bring some of the scatter assets in in order to scatter them so i'm going to go ahead and set this as my target but then i'm going to go to my biomes manager there's a tool in here for scatter asset and so there's a scatter asset bushes that i'm going to bring in so i'm just going to click on this and it's going to bring these in off to the side so it's going to import them all into my model so i can actually see them right so for example i've got this tree and this tree is pretty detailed like it's got a fair amount of geometry in it well the option over here for level of detail is going to allow you to bring in basically proxy models instead of your full model so let's say on this phase that we were to let's go with cluster plant small so let's see where to select this tree click on the button for scatter so notice how this brought these in with bounding boxes so the reason it brought these in with bounding boxes is because this is basically going to be a very high high polygon model that you bring in and so it's going to really slow down your pc alright so when we brought these in notice how under the instances there's now this little box right here right so first thing is these automatically got placed as bounding boxes so you can see how if i toggle this off then it'll turn the bounding boxes off that's something that was done automatically in order to protect your performance but there's also an option in here to click the drop down and for each one of these objects not only do they have a high polygon option in your viewport they also have a low polygon option and a proxy option and so if i was to turn these off and click on the proxy option what that does is that lets you see where your trees are without having to load in all of that geometry it's got a very low polygon look but if we were to add a camera and render this what it'll do is it'll swap those out for the high poly objects and let's just add a simple light like a sun switch this to rendered so when we switch to rendered view you get that actual geometry in here if you switch back to viewport shading mode you get the proxies so what that does is that really helps you with your performance so we can talk more about this in the future this is using a free add-on called laudify i think you can find out more by clicking the button right here and clicking on learn more about this feature there's going to be more information about all of these on that page but understanding levels of detail bounding boxes all of that different stuff is going to be really important when it comes to managing the size of your scattered models inside of blender and so now let's talk a little bit about masks masks are a lot of fun so let's create a new model i'm going to scale this up we're going to apply our scale i'm just going to tab in edit mode real quick and i'm just going to subdivide this so we'll do maybe a 10 and then we'll select them all we'll subdivide them again maybe something like this so this is important because when we use our masks it's going to use those faces in order to figure out where to place different things so let's go ahead and enable scatter so we're going to tap in notice scatters options only show up in object mode not in edit mode but let's take this object right here and let's scatter some more cubes and then we'll just do a we'll call it a cluster grass large on this box you can see how what this does is comes in here and this clusters all of these and we can turn the emission count down maybe a little bit and let's turn our random rotation and random scale up so that just placed a whole bunch of boxes in here right and that's basically how we would add something like grass or other things like that all right so let's say that we didn't want this to be scattered in this corner right here what we could do is we could add a mask so in this case let's click on create new mask we want to go to paint layer and so with inside a paint layer that's going to add this new paint layer that we can use in order to set if things are located in here so first thing we want to do is going to click on the button for paint and so when you click on the button for paint what that's going to do is that's going to take us into painting mode well now i'm going to click in here and i'm going to paint out some of this corner right here right so i can kind of paint on this face notice how it's painting in the red on this face right here so i'm going to paint this in i'm going to click on the button to add influence to selected system we'll notice how when i did that what that did is that basically removed all of the objects where i painted this out and now that this influence has been added to the system anywhere where i paint red you can see how it's going to not place objects in those red locations so i can use this to tell this where not to put things so that's basically how masks work is you can use this in order to set where things are located and so there's a lot of different tools that you can use in here to create different kinds of masks so let's say for example we're to add another camera so i'm going to do a shift a i'm not a hundred percent sure how to get out of this one i usually just click over to modeling and then back to layout and that usually works but let's say we were to add a camera so i'm just going to do a camera right here click on zero and so let's say we were again we were going to create a rendering right here right so the only thing that we want is these objects to be where our rendering is going to be nowhere else because if they're not going to be in our scene then we don't really need them right what you can do is you can add a mask and we're going to use the ray casting in order to do that it's basically going to mask everything out based on my current camera location so you can see i have this set to active camera so what we want to do is we want to click on the button for add influence to selected systems well notice how what that did is that masked out all of the objects everywhere except where my camera could see so this is a very powerful way to only place and scatter objects in a location where your camera can see them so this is going to get really important when you start dealing with bigger scenes and other things like that so there's some other tools in here as well i don't want to mess around with them too much because it's kind of an intro but basically there's a combing option which allows you to move objects destructively meaning once you move them they've been moved right there's not a whole lot you can do to it but notice how i was able to move those around using that comb function but do note that that is destructive meaning that now if you go back and you make changes some things are going to be kind of messed up right like your rotation other things like that aren't working anymore so once you comb then stuff isn't going to work the same way anymore so there's also some options in here to add some terrain displacement so you can add like some different noise if you want to do that to kind of displace your terrain and we can play around with those more in the future but overall what this does is this really allows us to randomize and place objects inside blender so this turned into a pretty long introduction but it gives you kind of an overview of the way that scatter works i'm planning on doing more videos about scatter in the future so leave a comment down below and let me know what you're interested in seeing and maybe i can make a video about that if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new blender content every week as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this i really appreciate it i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 17,314

Rating: 4.9350915 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, Blender Scatter, Blender Scattering Add-on, scatter add-on, blender scatter tutorial, blender scatter biomes, blender scatter assets, blender scatter landscape

Id: YY0aDPAPm1U

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020