Cluster Scatter

We are working a lot with landscape architects. One thing you note with planting is that it is not completely random. What they tend to do is group 3-6 plants of each type together across a bed. If we could have a cluster option on the surface scatters this would be really super. So as an example you have 10 different species and rather than just randomly mixing them all up, if you could group each type together in batches of XXX No. and then randomly distribute these groups without having to make scatter maps that would be very helpful

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 4:32 AM

@Adnan - Founder/CEO

Adnan Chaumette•8/14/24, 4:52 AM

Hi!
I've been looking into ways to make this process more efficient, and would love to hear your thoughts on what the process could look like!

As of now, you could make some planes to scatter each species on, and have a dedicated Surface Scatter that takes plane A, then plant species A, and do your scattering. This is an approach that you can use now, and while having one surface scatter for each plant might seem overwhelming, it would likely be beneficial in the even that you want to have some plants have more instances than others.

Adnan Chaumette•8/14/24, 5:04 AM

Basically something like this; I've made some planes and a circle geo, scattered on them, then hid them.

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 7:31 AM

Yeah - that is what we are already doing, but it is really labour intensive

Adnan Chaumette•8/14/24, 7:33 AM

what would the ideal workflow look like for you?

Adnan Chaumette•8/14/24, 7:34 AM

i can imagine that if the assets are named properly, that might help, but we'd still need to figure out the ideal distribution pattern, etc...

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 7:35 AM

If we have a design - we follow it really carefully.

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 7:40 AM

here you can see that the park to the north has large herbaceous borders, but we don't have time to create all of the spots or planes. So this is where a clustered random fill using our selected species would work. We name everything by species so it is easy to select 3 of each species for example and then group by similar name

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 7:42 AM

we could also do a distribution texture map - so lots of unique colours could work, but again we would need to make that texture

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 7:45 AM

These are the two types of planting drawings we get. One you can see has the location of every species, and the other just has coloured areas.

Adnan Chaumette•8/14/24, 7:46 AM

What if you created small disks/planes, scattered those with Surface Scatter, then hid you scatter your plants on those disks/planes?
Since Surface Scatter supports scattering on instances, that could make the process fairly quick.

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 7:49 AM

yep - that is precisely what we do for where we have a design. But what I am talking about is a faster way of scattering on a large area without all the manual work of creating all the circles

Adnan Chaumette•8/14/24, 7:51 AM

yeah what I'm suggesting above means you don't create the circles manually, they're just instances that you scatter with SS. Your plants then get scattered on them.

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 7:54 AM

ah - I see - yes - that is an interesting idea

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 7:55 AM

just need to work out all the densities. I will have a go

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 7:57 AM

but if you do come up with a neat way of doing this in a tool bar - that would also be super

Adnan Chaumette•8/14/24, 7:59 AM

Yeah we're radically changing the UI/UX of Dash in the upcoming update, and such tasks should become much easier to do.
Then for the update after, I hope to introduce some more robust features for pattern creation, as a client of ours is in need of this.

Appreciate you sharing those screenshots! It's gonna be of huge help as we work towards implementing this

sailingintothewindOP•8/14/24, 8:01 AM

no worries - look forward to the updates

Adnan Chaumette•8/14/24, 8:15 AM

reminder that once you scatter on those instanced disks, you could even use curves to further mask things out if needed.
This would use the Object Masking property group. If giving it a curve doesn't seem to work, try disabling Optimize for Curves and see if it works. Just found a bug around that; will investigate it.

Cluster Scatter

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