UltraScatterPro Experiments and Experiences

barbult

Szark said:

I haven't as I am weighing up wether to get Pro on what I see here in this thread and so far so good. However I just subscribed to Substance Indie so I will have to wait a little long before upgrading to Scatter Pro. Now if we got an upgrade price I would have gotten it already. :) I will need it eventually though. 

 

yeah I love the chainsaw trimming one, made me chuckle. 

UltraScatter (the original) had only Surface scatter. UltraScatterPro has Matrix and Volume as well as Surface. I just finished a Matrix experiment. I haven't yet shown Volume in this thread, other that the quick glimps at the flying leaf trimmings.

Even if all you do is Surface Scatter, one new feature in UltraScatterPro that is worth the upgrade by itself (in my opinion) is the ability to import a previous scatter to create a new scatter. So many times with UltraScatter (the original) I would scatter something and then later wish I had scattered a group so I had more variety. Before, I would have to look at the old scatter, write down all the settings, create a new scatter and reenter all the settings. Now I can just import that old scatter. It is like magic to me. It has saved me so much time.

Oso3D

The matrix scattering looks awesome. I would love to see something like that done for city blocks or similar, though I think all of the city stuff I have doesn't easily line up streets

 

barbult

Oso3D said:

The matrix scattering looks awesome. I would love to see something like that done for city blocks or similar, though I think all of the city stuff I have doesn't easily line up streets

 

What city blocks products are you thinking of, Will?

Szark

barbult said:

Szark said:

I haven't as I am weighing up wether to get Pro on what I see here in this thread and so far so good. However I just subscribed to Substance Indie so I will have to wait a little long before upgrading to Scatter Pro. Now if we got an upgrade price I would have gotten it already. :) I will need it eventually though. 

 

yeah I love the chainsaw trimming one, made me chuckle. 

UltraScatter (the original) had only Surface scatter. UltraScatterPro has Matrix and Volume as well as Surface. I just finished a Matrix experiment. I haven't yet shown Volume in this thread, other that the quick glimps at the flying leaf trimmings.

Even if all you do is Surface Scatter, one new feature in UltraScatterPro that is worth the upgrade by itself (in my opinion) is the ability to import a previous scatter to create a new scatter. So many times with UltraScatter (the original) I would scatter something and then later wish I had scattered a group so I had more variety. Before, I would have to look at the old scatter, write down all the settings, create a new scatter and reenter all the settings. Now I can just import that old scatter. It is like magic to me. It has saved me so much time.

Yeah those points makes me wanting it even more, thanks for pointing those out. Howie should give you a refund for all your great work in selling it. LOL

barbult

Szark said:

barbult said:

Szark said:

I haven't as I am weighing up wether to get Pro on what I see here in this thread and so far so good. However I just subscribed to Substance Indie so I will have to wait a little long before upgrading to Scatter Pro. Now if we got an upgrade price I would have gotten it already. :) I will need it eventually though. 

 

yeah I love the chainsaw trimming one, made me chuckle. 

UltraScatter (the original) had only Surface scatter. UltraScatterPro has Matrix and Volume as well as Surface. I just finished a Matrix experiment. I haven't yet shown Volume in this thread, other that the quick glimps at the flying leaf trimmings.

Even if all you do is Surface Scatter, one new feature in UltraScatterPro that is worth the upgrade by itself (in my opinion) is the ability to import a previous scatter to create a new scatter. So many times with UltraScatter (the original) I would scatter something and then later wish I had scattered a group so I had more variety. Before, I would have to look at the old scatter, write down all the settings, create a new scatter and reenter all the settings. Now I can just import that old scatter. It is like magic to me. It has saved me so much time.

Yeah those points makes me wanting it even more, thanks for pointing those out. Howie should give you a refund for all your great work in selling it. LOL

I'm one of his beta testers. He treats me well. I'm not a salesperson for his products, but I am a big fan of useful products like this! I have so much fun with it, I want other people to see what can be done and get enthused about using it, too.

Szark

LOL I was joking but cool that you are a tester, good choice IMO.

Oso3D

I was thinking of the Dystopian blocks and the Greeble City Blocks.

At least with Greeble City blocks, which I played with recently, they aren't uniform 'click into place' style city blocks, so any random script would have problems.

Then again, that's a possible product idea...

 

barbult

Oso3D said:

I was thinking of the Dystopian blocks and the Greeble City Blocks.

At least with Greeble City blocks, which I played with recently, they aren't uniform 'click into place' style city blocks, so any random script would have problems.

Then again, that's a possible product idea...

I have the two free Dystopia City Blocks products. I'll give them a try.

MelanieL

This is working up to be as interesting a thread as RGCincy's one on dForce.

Like Szark I didn't pick this up when it was released, even though I wanted it (I was short of funds just then) but it's high on my wishlist.

I love your animal topiary pics - very clever!

Oso3D

With the first Ultrascatter I made a fun shirt made of flowers... let's see if I have that...

Sort of like the topiary thing.

Ah, here it is:

barbult

MelanieL said:

This is working up to be as interesting a thread as RGCincy's one on dForce.

Like Szark I didn't pick this up when it was released, even though I wanted it (I was short of funds just then) but it's high on my wishlist.

I love your animal topiary pics - very clever!

Hi, MelanieL. I'm glad you got a kick out of the topiaries. Maybe you can pick it up on a good sale. Too bad HowieFarkes wasn't included today in the 60% flash sale with some of the other favorite vendors.

barbult

Oso3D said:

With the first Ultrascatter I made a fun shirt made of flowers... let's see if I have that...

Sort of like the topiary thing.

Ah, here it is:

A human topiary (sort of)! I like it. Thanks for sharing your image. I made a dress covered with dandelions once. it was very strange. I never really finished it into a scene, like you did. Here it is for a laugh.

 

barbult

Experiment: Create a City out of Dystopia City Blocks

This is a quick summary of how I created a city with Dystopia City Blocks. I used the two free products. Blocks 1-10 and Blocks 11-20

It took UltraScatterPro less than 30 seconds to create the 10,000 instances!

1. Load Dystopia City Blocks 1 through 20
2. Put the city blocks into a new Group
3. Scatter the Group with a Matrix scatter
   • Scatter the max matrix size: 100 rows on X, 100 rows on Z, and 1on Y
   • Set X and Z Spacing to the size of the city blocks 243.89
   • 
   • On the Rotation tab, set Y+- to 180.00 and Y Increment (deg) to 90.00
     • Note: This is another great feature that UltraScatterPro added. The rotation can be constrained to any increment you want. This is perfect for rotating the square city blocks so that they always line up on the 90 degree rotations.
   • ​

​​​Here's a top down view when I only scattered 25 by 25. That was still pretty big.

Here's a perspective view of the 25 by 25 city, looking into the sun.

And here finally is my 100 by 100 city with the camera angle arranged so you can see the streets lining up.

barbult

Experiment: Create a Big City from Urban Sprawl 3:

I first scattered Urban Sprawl 3 with a 3 by 3 Matrix scatter. After that success, I did 20 by 20, My computer got pretty slow with the instances in Full preview, but I wanted to see where to place the camera.

I was surprised by 2 things:

1. The blocks were all square and all the same size (or at least appeared to be the same).
2. My computer was able to scatter and render 20 by 20 in the GPU.

​

Artini

That looks amazing, Barbult. I were always wondering, how to create a big cities in Daz Studio.

 

Oso3D

Nicely done, Barbult!

Diomede

Awesome thread.  Will be watching with interest.  Learning UltraScatter Pro was my 3D-related new year's resolution.  These tests and explanations are perfect.  I hope I get a chance to contribute.

barbult

@Artini and @Oso3D I think they look too repetitive. I'm going to see what I can do to make a little more variation. For Urban Sprawl, I think I first need to run Scene Optimizer. At that distance, I think I could get by with less resolution. I probably don't need bump or normal maps (if it has any) at all. We'll see.

@Diomede_Carrara welcome to the thread! It's is great to hear that it it helpful. It's not really a tutorial, because I just jump around to whatever interests me at the moment.  I look forward to seeing what you come up with. The possibilities with UltraScatterPro are huge, and I'm sure there are a lot of things yet to be discovered.

MelanieL

barbult said:

MelanieL said:

This is working up to be as interesting a thread as RGCincy's one on dForce.

Like Szark I didn't pick this up when it was released, even though I wanted it (I was short of funds just then) but it's high on my wishlist.

I love your animal topiary pics - very clever!

Hi, MelanieL. I'm glad you got a kick out of the topiaries. Maybe you can pick it up on a good sale. Too bad HowieFarkes wasn't included today in the 60% flash sale with some of the other favorite vendors.

Yes I'm hoping for a good sale in the next couple of months - I still use the original UltraScatter quite a bit but would like the new features.

Those city blocks examples look really effective. (The dandelion dress is also quite cute!)

barbult

Experiment: Add more Variety to the Urban Sprawl 3 Big City:

I want to add more variety to the big city I made with Urban Sprawl 3 and UltraScatterPro. My viewport is almost completely unresponsive with this scene, so first I need to try to improve that issue. Then I want to add duplicate city blocks and hide some buildings or recolor them or something, to make variety, so I have more than 5 different blocks.

Warning - This experiment contains several steps that didn't seem to help much!

1. Reduce memory required for textures
   • LESSON LEARNED: Don't run Scene Optimizer on the full big city scene with all the instances! I started up the texture reduction. It seemed to be running slower than usual. I left the house for errands. When I came back 2.5 hours later, it was only on 67% done. I don't know if my computer was just low on memory because of the big scene, or whether Scene Optimizer was trying to process materials for every instance. I canceled the Scene Optimizer.
   • Start a new scene and load the 5 Urban Sprawl blocks
   • Run Scene Optimizer and save reduced textures to apply later
     • Reduce textures by a factor of 4. I used Smooth Scale and checked the boxes to overwrite textures and process PNG. It ran pretty fast, like normal, with this simpler scene.
     • Remove displacement maps
     • Remove bump maps
     • Remove normal maps
     • Exit Scene Optimizer
     • Save the scene
     • Exit Daz Studio
     • Restart Daz Studio
     • Load the scene saved with the Scene Optimizer textures (Save, Exit, Restart, Reload is necessary to realize the texture memory savings - see Scene Optimizer manual)
     • Select one block in the Scene pane (us03Roads01, etc.)
     • Save a Hierarchical Materials Preset, to create a new preset with the low resolution textures.
     • Repeat saving Hierarchical Materials Preset for each block, until all 5 are done. Now they are available to use later in any scene without having to run Scene Optimizer again.
   • Reload the Big City scene with all the instances
   • Select each of the 5 blocks in the Scene pane and apply the corresponding previously saved Hierarchical Materials Preset
   • Save the scene
   • Exit Daz Studio
   • Restart Daz Studio
   • Load the saved big city scene with the reduced textures
   • Try navigating in the viewport to see if it is faster now. Darn! Viewport navigation with full preview for instances doesn't seem to be significantly better after reducing texture file size. Maybe textures are not my viewport navigation problem. Well, it should help memory usage while rendering anyway. I hope it allows me to add more blocks to my scene or more variety.
2. Render the scene with reduced texture size
   • Render the scene
   • Compare the reduced texture scene render with the previous full size texture render.
   • They look almost identical to me. I probably could have reduced them more.
   • Here is my render with textures reduced by a factor of 4:
   • ​​​​
3. Create modified blocks to add to the scatter
   • Note: In order to work efficiently I have to make all the UltraScatterPro instances invisible while I work on the actual block objects
     • Select the UltraScatterPro [M] Group in the Scene pane.
     • Run UltraScatterPro
     • Set Preview instances to None (you won't see your big city at all)
     • Click the Cancel button (no need to rescatter)
   • Add more blocks
     • Select the 5 Urban Sprawl blocks in the group we created earlier and duplicate them (Edit>Duplicate Node(s))
     • Make sure they are in the group with the original blocks, so when we rescatter, they are included!
   • Make the duplicate blocks look different than the original
     • Modify some texture colors of the objects in the block (put a color in Base Color or change the Base Color texture map). 
     • Hide some elements (Water towers, billboards, air conditioners, fire escapes, etc.
     • Change the Y scale of some buildings to be taller or shorter
4. Rescatter
   • Select the UltraScatterPro [M] Group in the Scene pane.
   • Run UltraScatterPro
   • Leave Preview instances set to None (you won't see your big city). change it to Bounding box, or try Full)
   • Click the Matrix Scatter button
5. Render the newly scattered Big City
   • 

Continued below

Szark

Very cool. Imagine what we can do if we change the Hue and/or saturation of the reduced maps and use a few more bases for Instancing.

barbult

Szark said:

Very cool. Imagine what we can do if we change the Hue and/or saturation of the reduced maps and use a few more bases for Instancing.

Exactly what I am working on right now!

Oso3D

I’m very curious; at one point I was trying to populate the interior of a space ring habitat...

Szark

barbult said:

Szark said:

Very cool. Imagine what we can do if we change the Hue and/or saturation of the reduced maps and use a few more bases for Instancing.

Exactly what I am working on right now!

great minds and all that  

barbult

Experiment: Add more Variety to the Urban Sprawl 3 Big City (Continued):

Urban Sprawl Big City is looking better with more variety (see first post in this experiment), but I think UltraScatterPro can do even more to add variety in scale. Plus, we get to play with more UltraScatterPro features!

1. Let UltraScatterPro scale the blocks
   • Note: We only want to scale in the Y direction, because if we do non-uniform scaling in X or Z, the blocks won't fit seamlessly together any more. And that would be bad!
   • Select the UltraScatterPro [M] Group in the Scene pane.
   • Run UltraScatterPro
   • In the Scaling tab, in Scale from, set Y Scale to 80. In Scale to, set Y Scale to 120. We don't want to get too drastic, or proportions might look wrong
   • 
   • In the 3D Noise section, pick Cellular (or anything you want to experiment with)
   • Click the Matrix Scatter button
   • 
2. Make a new city
   • Select the UltraScatterPro [M] Group in the Scene pane.
   • Run UltraScatterPro
   • In the Distribution tab, change the seed value.
   • In the Scaling tab, change the seed value.
   • In the Rotation tab, change the seed value.
   • Clcik the Matrix Scatter button.
   • It rescatters in seconds and renders in 7 minutes and looks very different.
   • 

Szark

How much RAM and what GC have you got in your rig? I got myself a GTX 1080 TI

barbult

Szark said:

How much RAM and what GC have you got in your rig? I got myself a GTX 1080 TI

You've got me beat. I have a GTX 980 Ti  and 32 GB RAM in my computer. This big city rendered fine in my graphics card and really fast (7 minutes). Instances are great!!!!

Edit for spelling.

Szark

arr but you have twice as much RAM as me but not for long I am getting another 16 gb next week. :P 

 

Yeah instances are but one problem I found with them, you can't use Canvasses 

barbult

Experiment: Add Life to the Urban Sprawl 3 Big City

Urban Sprawl Big City looks pretty sterile. There are a few little trees, but you can't really see them. The roads are empty; no traffic. There are no pedestrians, but they would probably be too small too see anyway.

1. Add Traffic
   • OMG - it has taken me hours to place cars and trucks and busses in these Urban Sprawl 3 roads! My first thought was to use UltraScatterPro to scatter traffic on the blocks. After trying to create distribution maps and selection sets to constrain the traffic to the road areas, I realized that you can't scatter instances of instances, so I threw out that idea. I had to place each car, truck and bus individually (each is a prop from either Urban Sprawl 3 or Urban Sprawl 2) on the 10 blocks that I would later scatter into the big city. Of course I don't want all my cars the same color, so I applied Iray car shaders to most of them. The roads are three lane one way roads, which complicated things further. I'm sure some of my vehicles are going the wrong direction. Even after hours of placing vehicles, it still looks very sparse. I get very little pay off for the hours spent! Can you even see those tiny specs?
   • The fact that you can't scatter instances of instances also explains why I see so few trees in the Big City. Most of the trees in Urban Sprawl 3 are already instances created by Stonemason. So, they don't show up in my UltraScatterPro instances.
   • 
2. Add green space
   • We need some parks in this city
   • Create a new scene (so it is easier to work. The big city scene is slow to work in.
   • Load one of the Urban Sprawl blocks
   • Delete all buildings in the central area.
   • Change the shader on the paving to a grass shader
   • Put some trees and bushes in the scene
   • Add traffic on the streets
   • Delete some buildings on the outside of the block to make more grass area in the block
   • Run Scene Optimizer to reduce textures
   • Save the scene(Green Space scene)
   • Open the Big City scene
   • Merge in the Green Space scene
   • Put the Green Space block in to the group of blocks that get scattered with UltraScatterPro
   • Select the existing UltraScatterPro [M] scatter group
   • Run UltraScatterPro
   • Set Preview instances to Full
   • Click Matrix Scatter
   • Evaluate the position of the new parks (Green Space) in the city
   • Change distribution, scale, and/or rotation seeds and scatter again until a satisfying arrangement is achieved
   • 

barbult

Experiment: Add Action to the Urban Sprawl 3 Big City

The Urban Sprawl 3 Big City is nice, but it is kind of dull. Nothing is happening. We need some action and a story line. I have this idea that news helicopters should be circling above the city while the courthouse below is in flames. 

1. Set the "courthouse" on fire!
   • If I modify one of the blocks to add flame props to it, every instance of that building will have those flames. My vision is not fires all over the city (although that could also be interesting), but flames on just one building. So, I need to get rid of one instance and replace it with an actual unique prop that I can modify. My city is a Matrix scatter, not a Surface scatter, so I can't use a Distribution Image Map or constrain to a Selection Set or Surface. I will use Affinity, and its Repel feature.
     • Note: All three UltraScatterPro scatter types (Surface, Volume, and Matrix) have an Affinity option for Density Control. Affinity has both Attract and Repel settings. These settings allow you to control how close to and how far from another object's origin your scattered instances will be placed.  I think of Attract and Repel kind of like magnetic poles. Attract pulls instances toward the other object and Repel pushes them away from the other object. The Attract settings specify the distance over which instances will be placed, and Repel settings specify a keep-away distance. The Falloff is an ease in/ease out type of control for the boundary of the Attract and Repel range. 
   • Since I am going to use the Affinity Repel feature, I need another object to Repel from, and I need to place the origin of that object where I want to repel my city block scatter.
   • Create a primitive cylinder tall enough to be seen above the city blocks, for ease in placement. Make sure the Origin is World Center, not Object Center. We need the origin at ground level, not half way up the cylinder, so the origin is at the same level as the origin of the city blocks.
   • 
   • Translate the cylinder to the position in the scene where you want city block instances to be repelled.
     • Note: This can be tricky, because the cylinder is placed at 0,0,0 when it is created. That location may not be in your camera view of the Big City. I used a split viewport (Window>Viewports>Side by Side) so I could set one side to Perspective to move freely around and left the other viewport in my scene camera view so I could tell when the cylinder translation made it visible in by camera view. Try to place the cylinder near the center of a block. This is easiest to visualize with Preview instances Full, but for me, it was almost impossible to move around the viewport in that mode. Preview instances Bounding Box is less resource intensive.
   • ​
   • Select the UltraScatterPro [M] group in the Scene pane.
   • Run UltraScatterPro
     • In the Distribution tab Density Control section on the right, use the Object/Group drop down to select the Cylinder as the Affinity object. Note: You will have to scroll all the way to the end of a LONG list of objects to choose from, because the Urban Sprawl 3 has so many objects. The mouse scroll wheel can help you get to the bottom of the list faster.
   • Set Repel (cm) to 5000.00.
     • Note: 5000 worked for me, because I had my cylinder placed close to the center of a city block. Each city block is slightly less than 10000 cm in XY dimensions. You may ave to adjust the position of your cylinder if Repel doesn't eliminate one city block instance.
   • ​Click the Matrix Scatter button.
     • Note: When you change scatter settings and rescatter, the random arrangement of instances will change. We changed settings to add Repel, so the rescattered city will have a different placement of city block instances.
   • When the scatter finishes, you should see a "hole" in your city, the size of one city block. If not, reposition your cylinder and try again. Be sure your cylinder was created with origin World Center.
   • 
   • Change the viewport back to Single View, if you changed it to Side by Side.
   • Change the UltraScatterPro Preview instances to Bounding Box, it you were using Full.
   • Load another Urban Sprawl 3 block prop into your scene.
   • Move the new block into position to fill the hole created by removing one instance, using the same kind of techniques used to position the cylinder. In fact, you can move the new block to the cylinder position as a starting point.
   • Hide the cylinder. We don't need it anymore.
   • Modify the new city block to add flame props so it looks like it is on fire. 
     • Note: You can set the UltraScatterPro Preview instances to None while doing this, or just click the eye next to the UltraScatterPro [M] group to hide the proxies.
   • ​​​Add some fire engines on the street if you have some. I even extended the ladder on the truck I had.
   • 

Continued below.