Scatterers in Clarisse are just great. They are very easy to control, reliable and they render in no time.
I've been using them for matte painting purposes, just feed them with a bunch of different trees to create a forest in 2 minutes. Add some nice lighting and render insane resolution. Then use all the 3D material with all the needed AOV's in Nuke and you'll have full control to create stunning matte paintings.
To make this demo a bit funnier instead of trees I'm using cool Lego pieces :)
- Create a context called obj and import the grid.obj and the toy_man.obj
- Create another context called shaders and create generic shaders for the objs.
- Also create two textures and load the images from the hard drive.
- Assign the textures to the diffuse input of each shader and then assign each shader to the correspondent obj.
- Set the camera to see the Lego logo.
- Create a new context called crowd, and inside of it create a point cloud and a scatterer.
- In the point cloud set the parent to be the grid.
- In the scatterer set the parent to be the grid as well.
- In the scatterer set the point cloud as geometry support.
- In the geometry section of the scatterer add the toy_man.
- Go back to the point cloud and in the scattering geometry add the grid.
Now play with the density. In this case I’m using a value of 0.7
As you can see all the toy_men start to populate the image.
- In the decimate texture add the Lego logo. Now the toy_men stick to the Logo.
- Add some variation in the scatterer position and rotation.
- That’s it. Did you realise how easy was to setup this cool effect? And did you check the polycount? 108.5 million :)
- In order to make this look a little bit better, we can remove the default lighting and do some quick IBL setup.
Final render.