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Forest Pack 7's usability improvements
How to use the several usability and other improvements added in FP7
Technologies:
Forest Pack

Resources

Requirements

Forest Pack 7

  • Forest Pack Logo, The Scatteting tool for 3ds Max

This tutorial contains a grab bag of the smaller improvements that we’ve added in Forest Pack 7 to make working with the plugin day-to-day just that little bit more pleasant. These include

  • Supports Object ID render passes in V-Ray. To use it, all you need to do is assign an object ID to your source geometry and then add an Object ID or a MultiMatte render element and for the first time V-ray users can render usable passes from Forest Pack for post-production work!
  • A new option called Open Single rollout. When this is enabled from the settings in the General rollout, Forest Pack will only open one rollout at a time. If you open another rollout, any that are already open will be closed. 
  • Changes to the way that Forest Pack distributes objects on the Z-axis when using multiple closed spline areas. In Forest pack 6 and below, when multiple splines were used. All objects in all areas would be aligned to the height of the topmost spline area, in Forest Pack 7 now the Z position of the individual splines is respected making it much easier to setup scatters on multiple levels where a surface area would not really be required. This works whether the splines are added as separate objects or if they’re sub-splines of a single editable spline object. In the event that one spline is inside another, then the lowest spline is used to determine the z position of the scattered items. This feature also works in the free Forest Pack Lite, making it much more useful for populating multiple areas on a site. 
  • V-Ray 5 and Corona have some nifty new maps types that allows you to randomise multi-maps and randomly offset and rotates UVs per instance. We’re pleased to say that Forest Pack 7 has been improved to support these new map types. 
  • The Camera rollout has been reorganized and simplified,  The Camera parameter has been removed. In Forest Pack 7 and above the Camera data is collected automatically using the active view or render. This has resulted in a much more reliable experience, no more fiddling around selecting cameras, and it’s much more dependable when batch rendering from multiple views. You’ll also notice that Camera features are disabled in the viewport by default. This is to improve responsiveness for large areas. If you’d like camera culling in the viewports, just check the Enable on Viewport option..
  • Forest Pack scatters are now much more stable on animated UV surfaces
  • There are a couple more small changes, for exampleV-Ray now uses the materials assigned to each Custom Object, instead of the Automaterial. In fact in V-Ray the automaterial is now completely ignored at render time. It’s used only for viewport display. 

We hope you find this little changes handy. Give them a try for yourself, Forest Pack 7 is available now.