MASH World Node - Terrestrial Ecosystems

hello everyone and so this video is going to be an introduction it's called a part 1 - the world knows terrestrial ecosystem mode now what this does it allows us to create a and scientifically plausible shall we say and distribution of trees and plant things on a landscape and this takes this you know is extremely quick to set up and you have lots of control over it and we can set up different tree types with genotypes if you want to so because the kind of layers of complexity to this that you can use if you want to or if you just want a nice looking natural distribution and you don't need to kind of use these extra layers of complexity so we have all sorts of advanced features like map based IDs and soil moisture soil quality and temperature kind of slope variants all this kind of stuff and but it's also enough by default you've got to kind of turn all of the complexity on if you want it but from it's kind of most basic point of view it's pretty pretty simple to use and yeah so let's get started and with some of the more more advanced features like the the terrain moisture and terrain quality like soil quality and and our M shade features so things growing in shade and things not growing in shade and all that kind of stuff I will say for a second video but in this first video we'll just cover the basics so I'm going to start off by opening a new scene and we'll take it from there so you've seen cube and I'll just create a mesh network so create mash network and then literally I'm just going to add a world mode to take you can see what's going on so hopefully will you watch the other video about the cluster mode down here like at the bottom we have a terrestrial ecosystem mode let's turn that on turn off the cluster it will sorry roll and roll up the cluster and then roll down the terrestrial eat system settings and if i zoom out and then just increase the interest to major see them kind of all the stuff happening and all these points appearing from nowhere thought what I'm going to do is I will just go into the genotype editor bear with me I'll show you this what this means in a second and they're going to change the model size from 10 to 1 because that cube is 1 1 point and slide so now and hopefully be able to see what's going on so here's our ecosystem and as our original points rec and and then if I just keep this going you'll see that more points appear or a more points appearing and then doing that they are kind of scattered a a em yeah as we say it's scientifically plausible so did lots of research into different ways of simulating air terrestrial ecosystems and fossils on one look we found produced extremely good results with a the shortest calculation time so yeah I mean really you make this immediate you know the setting just to get you going is this there is this ecosystem age so this is literally simulating this many years of an ecosystem so if I as I turn this up and if you can see that this simulation is temporal it's stable which you can do time lapses if things appearing and dying over time and so pretty cool and yeah so that C is actually a kind of your basic setting so some of these points are appearing and clubs over here and that's because we simulate wind as well so since seed being blown further away so here's what's happening a tree grows lips clots and seeds that truly grow exist it drops and seeds that tree grows perfect rocks from seed and the kind of the Cubs appear again like I said because of the wind simulation and then all of the the kind of the rules for and how old the tree is when it dropped some seeds and how far away they are and how many sees does it drop naught kind of thing and how old the tree last are all controlled in the genus type editor which I'm knitting to justice or and so we have this maximum age we have how old the tree is when it starts dropping seeds how many does it drop every year how much is a tree grow every year and the model size here is them all about stopping intersections and it should be based on how large your model is go into the system this is manual at the moment we would like to make it automatic in the future but you can have to wait for the relationship bar for that so at the moment we can just pop in a manual number just however big your object is that cube is one unit wide so that's how we know this is correct and we're going to slope threshold here which is how steep slope can be before the tree will stop growing and then we've got a randomizer which randomizes all of these elements and then we've got this object ID here which is kind of them controller to which model on the instance air or on the repo note that your creations ID color down here is forward at a time explain that later so what we can do here which we can randomize genotypes so we can turn the label colors we can load a preset the right menu presets and sorry they'll have to come later and and we can add a new genotype just by right-clicking our genotype or you can just use this attitude attempt button here so whenever you make a change at C the system so let's say that the seed age is certainly going to be 20 whenever you make a change you have to hit with your fresh dirt in the pair there's suddenly there were fewer trees because our trees are not seeing how much older we lower this number so we just I just type some new number and then committed it by pressing return or enter and then we hit refreshed and we'll have more trees i honest because they're feeding younger and and yeah that's kind of how goes this works so and yes so that's kind of the basics really of the system and a few more settings that we can ease right so um we've got some extra bits down here we'll go see multiplier which is basically a global multiplier for the seed count so you can use that too and create kind of verb and a less healthy ecosystem as well and so that's kind of factored into the simulation whenever we drop seeds we drop whatever the C count is multiplied by this amount and we also have this max elements which is basically a controller for how many trees or plants in the ecosystem we keep track of so this is just to prevent if you've got an enormous landscape is to prevent things from getting completely out of control as you if you go into the genotype editor and then you say how many seeds is this tree drop and you type in a thousand and then you could very quickly end up just with a calculation is going to take hours to complete so this max elements is basically M stopping stopping users from committing suicide effectively so that's what that's there for it's like on the on the distribute node in mesh we have a maxbox will count down here we've got this maximum box account which will just then save you if you choose a size of voxel but is impossibly small so that's just what that's about basically and so we also have this staff to control so if I turn Spassky down or our five cents box okay something like five and then our trees will be kind of further apart and that's because this velocity and means that each tree wants more space and so that's what this controller is for C term at lower than want to get a more densely packed kind of IgG system and a new tenant above one to get a more sparse ecosystem we've also got random rotations here we've got we had what we have some ground mesh control to it and I will show you all of the next steps of what and I'll show you the input mesh but I will show you calculate shader tool for this video and so starting using afresh something else I just wanted to show you quickly before we get into the big heavy terrain is an avoidance so I'm just going to quickly go set up that scene again as setting our model size to 1 setting the cluster mode stress relief system and then let's go 12 forward a few years and yes me I want to show you was avoidance so let and we need that for avoidance to work properly as the avoidance is down into this avoidance showdown for avoidance to it properly a you need a ground match so let's create a ground mesh like this and then we'll I'm just going to give this am dark color so we can see what's going on and then we'll add this to our world modes ground meshes roll down so just drag that plane onto into my share so that's limit so you can system to the input mesh all the other points that were going off it ball eggs peer and what we can do now is for example if I if I take us through 20 years em a few more trees going on and let's just increase the speed counter say 8 refresh this just see if it gets them you look so close and loads and loads of trees so what I'm about to do is going to be quite slow but it's worth showing you if there are a few ways to do what I'm going to do and so I'm just going to add a curve to the scene there you go and I'm going to drag the curve onto and the object to avoid here so what should happens when I do that so I drug the curve on to the object to avoid and you'll notice something has something interesting has almost happened so the objects to kind of try to avoid the curves but not by much alright so you can see there's definitely discernible gap where the curve is but it avoidance radius is set to 1 so let's set up to 10 right and then I can show you how this works so as you can see the avoidance radius is set to 1 but the objects are some objects are still appearing right near the middle and that's because of this graph so the graph is if you write the top of the object so if you write at the curved line don't grow but progressively get more likely to grow the further out you are from the for me avoidance radius okay so that's how that works and the way to and to adjust it's not just going to turn off the node completely I'm going to add another point in here just so that the there's more of a clear zone away from the curve before we start getting points and they're just going to enable this again sometimes easy to avoid expensive calculations like that and there we go is voided objects where the curve is and of course this works like if the curve was following a landscape whatever another way to do this is to paint vertex color so you can paint vertical is where you want where you want objects to grow and where you want them to Mott's grow so you just grab this and then you can literally just paint the four going to the modeling tool set well modeling tool set and then mesh display paint versus colors you can paint white where you want your objects to grow and black we don't want them to grow I'll show you that in the next video and just as something to note is that the objects to avoid drop zone accepts meshes curves Bezier curves and mash nodes so you can actually use mash points as avoiding the subject so you can use one mash Network to say don't grow around me so you could say scattered some use a place to node with a mash network to put some points on a surface or you can use clusters or whatever you want to do and then you can drag that mash Network does a waiter into another ecosystem to say don't grow plant around these these existing objects so you can create some really complex setups really quickly so yeah that's that and then just be aware of the place no absolutely at the world mode it's very quick actually what it does because you're the millions of calculations that happen every time you're just something but just be aware that it is not super real-time like you're not going to if you're you animate the you system age going from an age of zero to an age of 120 you're not going to get 60 frames per second playback and that's just because of the millions and millions of things going on the background and so just yet just seem to be aware of you can just might have to email an adjustment you might have to wait a couple of seconds so if I change the ecosystem age now to 100 that's just taken two seconds to update and so just be aware that this isn't as fast as similarly the mash notes but it is still and pretty quick and the simulation is completely deterministic and so that it's the same every time and what would see is something else I was going to mention oh just just to be clear that the existence immolating a 100 years worth of plant growth so that's what happens when you make it an adjustment you we go through and we recently like these trees or plants and existed 400 years and so that's what's happening that's what the eat is to make controls okay so now let's move on to our and through our landscape project oh here we are on our landscape and I've decided to give our trees different colors so that we can see them more easily and it just may be something you want to do the Diagnostics thing just making sure you get the balance in your systems and whether you artistically are happy with and but yeah I'm just doing it to is obvious and so here we have our trees we have four trees and we've got them at different stages of their age so we've got young and mature and we'll be signing IDs to them based on how old the trees are so let's scrub all of our trees in age order so a young to old hold down the shift key so young link to old like so and then we'll create a new mash Network and here is our here our trees the ID defaults to zero and so something actually I'm going to explain the full yes keep going is I'm going to grab the terrain here and I'm going to go into the modeling moni's and show you the paint vertex color and it and with our painted black where the river is basically just so that no trees or Grover and because the terrain goes in to make the river so I've also painted some gray areas which means that trees will be a lot less likely to grow there as well so just need to be aware of and if you weren't required this is all looks a little bit weird it's because I ran probably reduce on it and just to lighten the load on my airport I'm at Claire's homes display so I'm just going to turn off the and color display there and then is that much network go back to our regularly scheduled program and they're going to drag our landscape in so just hold down shift and click on the plus which will just open up all of these sub zones below something and I'm going to drag our landscape in so that we get as initial point now why have I done that well the world knows needs some original seed positions and these are useful for several reasons but and effectively all you need to know from the get-go is that without well as without some seeds to propagate nothing can grow so effectively this is your original it is indeed kind of just throwing down some seasonal landscape in and seeing what happens so you do that with the distributor placer or whatever you want to do and as long as it goes before the world mode so and let's turn off like a rotation because you want to reach the point upward and we can assign random rotations after if you wanting yeah so let other worlds know now so by default this goes into the cluster mode and we want to rush relief system and you know she's actually that hovering and that's because we need to drop our landscape into the input mesh yet so let's do that so it's go by landscape again and then drop into the input mesh and so our trees are now on our landscape and I kind of run through the years here you'll see more trees appearing and growing up and all that kind of thing and and with all our under rotations not like kind of thing in them yes after about eight years we end up with something like this so pretty cool so obviously there are lots lots of intersections going on here and that's because our model slide is wrong now I'm going to guess these because I didn't actually measure the model and but if you do is probably you would measure the models but I think this one's going to be something like thirty seen units wide so I'm just going to hit refresh and I think I've got that quite wrong I think it would speak twenty ships so it's not that okay so you end up with and I'm getting lightly so the larger a tree the further away you can then further away it feeds can travel which is why you end up with something like this so if I rewind the simulation you can see it is a kind of the spread of the seeds now happens like this and and yeah so but you can control all these remember you can control you know I see multiple multiplication and sparsity all kind of thing on a global level but right now we're going to add some more ecosystems for more story genotypes into the ecosystems so let's do that we're just going to add a second genotype and alka so call this tree one and I will call this tree too so you can give specific IDs to trees and to do that you just go to the objects ID and you hit and so let's say that that we want this tree to be ID 6 so let's hit refresh and now what's going to happen is every other tree in our ecosystem every the seed so these original 11 seed half of those now going to have randomly half of them are going to have be assigned by v6 and half of them are going to be assigned ID object ID 0 and so they're going to know the genotypes could be split like randomly and that means that half the trees will be of one type and half will be of another and so of course because this is random it might not be split down the middle it might be eight of one and four of another kind of thing so and it is random and you can just stay even surrounded on the world know that will affect this where is it down here so if we check the random seed we get a different distribution and so yes that's kind of how this works and um oh what pointing out actually that I think this second exit might made the model size will be wrong to get I think the lot of us is to welcome at one maybe it's nice to be something like fifteen and okay so let's zoom out and if for example we were to make the second egg system let's just label this one green because the tree is green and then let's label this one blue because the tree is blue so we can just and like them imagine what's what if we change the speed count on mystery to say two and then hit refresh we got a lot fewer of them so hardly any of them really nice because I think so that gives you a clue as to what's happening there so let's change that to three and refresh and and then you can just play those settings so let's say that then tree the blue tree and doesn't like Grove on slopes but the green tree dirt so we change the throat slope threshold on the green tree to something like naught point four and hit return they like slopes and then on the blue tree if we change those slopes threshold to say north point seven then they will change it to something really obvious southern 0.8 but they're going to stick away stay away from the many kind of like hilly areas so this is there are hardly any eaten more than mode blue trees where it's sloping here and there are no blue trees right slipping here but there are green ones and so you can kind of control individual characteristics about the trees like so so I said that when these original seeds and distribute knows they get random they get assigned random randomly to the genotype the way that you would control that if you wanted to be specifically a tree the seed that starts over here to be signed one ID and the seeds that starts say over here a different ID that's what we are D matters for sorry it's not called my D map it's called a genotype map so you will sign a ramp or a texture or something a to the wall to the slot here and then that will be used along with you these of the underlying landscape mesh to assign and IDs based on this idea color I will show this in a different video but that's kind of like it just a hint into how you control specifically what IDs are where and obviously you cannot you can control this you can compare the story this would be what seed IDs and if you wanted to specifically say I want all the trees over here to be of one type you would need to do that with a place to node by painting the IDs or you would do it with the ID node by setting IDs of that so there's just something to be aware of that this being a natural simulation there will be intermingling as so that then you can you know you couldn't guarantee that all the trees over here will be blue and if you use the genotype map just because the green trees will drop seeds over there and some of them might survive and all that kind of thing so well I do a lot of talking when I should be yeah should be showing you things so I will add some more genotypes as a couple more genotypes so this genotype will be tree three and something else actually before we kick before we check they're more talking before we get there let's then let's assign IDs by age so tree one we've got three IDs zero one and two so I've got young mature oh no three one is their younger mature so let's set zero and one so you can set a minimum iid zero and a maximum ID is one and as soon as one of these values while as soon as the maximum ID is non zero then that means the object ID will be ignored so we set the minimum ID 0 maximum ID of 1 which means that based on their age they'll be assigned a different model so tree 2 is at 2 to 4 so we go min Isaac - max my ID for like so and tree early 3 is 5 to 7 like so so if we just hit refresh now we've got we should have some white trees in here we do okay so that's white redness and no white trees over on this side of the river I guess it's because the seeds for the white ones are only over here and and then we will add a to the wall street full and it's ID where we finished her so this would be eight to ten and refresh that and then I think the color of these will be yellow so let's just change the label color to yellow so I should tell you what's going on there and then all we can do is and we can dock this actually if we want to but I'll just move out of the way and I'll just go and set the age to being in 20 years weeks to growth and then here we go here so here's our resulting ecosystem and of course we probably those last trees as yellow trees and we probably need to whoops the yellow trees we probably need to change the size of them so let's change them to say 20 in the Refresh league system okay just to avoid our intersections like I said you would probably measure that properly if you were M doing mister so realsies and that I give you our mix of four trees over landscape and yeah so if certain trees dominant to one area and not another just because it's the way that we have our em our initial seed set down by this you know so for a much more intermingled look you just simply up this number right so if I add this number to say 100 then the seeds for all trees should be kind of all over the place so we should have all all the colors in all sections so we've got the four colors over here and we've got the four colors over here and I'm hearing all that kind of thing so we pop this down to say the ten again or with eleven em and then you end up with these kind of dominant areas because and say the the only seeds over here would have been green and here green and then the only ones over here will get white or whatever so yeah that's kind of how that works then you just controlled with them whatever kind of technique you want to get the look that you want and then say if we're not happy with how many blue trees there are we could go back in here and get into see you can say eight on this tree and refresh this and and that will give us loads more blue trees and and make you realize that your model size and still probably not quite right on that definitely not right on that and yeah so let's just update that then maybe change that down to six and refresh I killed it I killed them what did I do let's come back okay the model size is affecting aware and where it cuts of seeds and obviously if a seed is cast to near another tree won't survive and because we simulate competition with other trees and all that kind of thing and so all that just goes on anyway L what else what else what else what sauce and so yeah I'll just show you this plaster control in here so if I took this pasty sake ten and the trees will well look at that so the trees are obviously too close together capacity to hasn't done anything so I so that's twenty you can see that a gaps between the trees starting to increase so if I can assist you now see that the whole landscape is kind of more spread out going to fly set this back down to say 20 or whatever which to me much lower or one and you end up with more densely populated landscape and then sit this down so the original of one will end up because it might incorrect model slices you'll end up with some intersecting things but you know that might do what you want so and there's a long in the short of it and that is them well anti-aliasing and this graphics card do not work across together and yeah so that's kind of well I'm a sort of how you set up an existence so I know it's pretty ugly just because I've used different colors of tree there but em but just showing you showing you what's what so it'll be another video we're going to using the maps here which is the super advanced features along with the calculate shade and which just means that and things won't grow where the Sun doesn't get to so and yeah that's them that's it so hopefully you found it useful hopefully you find this feature useful and just use it very quickly to scatter things in a plausible way on the landscape so yeah and actually have you find useful and questions on a postcard thank you very much for watching

Channel: Ian Waters

Views: 33,382

Keywords: maya, mash, motion graphics, mograph, world, ecosystem

Id: wloCNbLRetQ

Length: 26min 50sec (1610 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2017