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I am currently trying to scatter objects on a curved surface (in this example I try to scatter hemispheres on a torus. And I have a problem with scattered objects orientation. Maxwell is not orienting objects like I suppose it should.

First I was trying to do this in Maya, then tried the same in Studio with the same result.

The scene is pretty simple: a torus and a hemisphere are positioned in zero with frozen transformations. All scatter variations are zeroed out, scale is set to 1, rotations to zero, direction is set to polygon normal.

Here are the screenshots:




I tried various orientation of hemispheres with freezing transform but can't get a consistent scattering. What am I doing wrong?

By the way, in Maya there are some long strangely oriented spikes in a viewport that just obstruct the view, is it just me having this bug?

Torus is about 25 cm in diameter, Maya units are cm.

Maya 2014 SP4, Maxwell 3.0.1, Maya plugin 3.0.10

Thank you

Could you try setting the initial angle setting to 90?

I can't find this setting in studio but in Maya it changes only the orientations of these long spikes. Restarting Fire doesn't show any changes.

Hello.

I am still not able to get a consistent rotation no matter what I try.

Here are two more screenshots. The scenes are easily reproducible so I don't post the files. As I said before, changing initial angle setting doesn't affect the render so I am not posting 0° screenshots, they are exactly the same (I did a freeze transform and a full render restart after applying each change).




Can you confirm it's a bug that will be fixed or is it a problem in my setup?

Another question is about the distribution of hemispheres across the plane. Any chance to limit a minimal distance between scattered objects to remove self-penetration?

One more question. Is it currently possible to make scattered objects scale randomly but uniformly? Currently each axis seems to be randomly scaling individually producing deformed objects.

Thank you.

Hello Andrey,

Forget the Initial Angle parameter. On the MaxwellScatterer, the angles are governed by the Rotation fields instead.

In order to get the result you want, ensure you freeze the transformations on the source object, otherwise its original transformations can be transferred to its clones. I'm attaching a sample render similar to your to let you see.

Freeze the transformations and set its pivot to the origin. You can offset the geometry from the pivot if you want to cause a certain gap.

And about your questions: No, at the moment the scattering system is not taking previous clones into consideration to avoid averlapping, but we are studying it for next versions.

And at the moment the random scale is not possible to be uniform, although we are also studying it.
The only workaround to overcome this would be create 4 or 5 similar scattering generations, each regarding a different-scaled version of the hemisphere, so you con end up with a mix of bigger and smaller objects distributed.

Let me know if this answers your questions.

Greetings

Dario Lanza

Hello Dario,

Thank you for the answer.

Here's another test and now I attach a scene for you to test. Please, have a look, why can't I get the same behavior that you show on your render.



Scene file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/724 ... est.ma.zip

Thank you.

With the help of my friend that has a PC I see that the same scene is processed ok on a PC and has a bug on a Mac. Even those green spikes are showing correct normals when applying scatter on a PC while on a Mac they are oriented somewhat chaotically.

Hello Andrey,

Thank you for the clue.
We'll try to figure out what is causing this only on Mac.

Greetings

Dario Lanza

Hello,

Were you able to reproduce this bug? Is it confirmed?

Thank you.

Any updates? Thank you.

+1

The new maxwell_maya_osx_3.0.13 fixes this issue except the viewport display which still shows randomly oriented spikes. But it renders just like expected in both Fire and Maxwell! Thanks, NL!

Hello Andrey,

I'm glad to hear that the latest version of the plugin is taking the rotation values for the scattered instances properly.

Thank you for confirming.

Greetings

Dario Lanza