Increased Use Cases for Path scatter.
When experimenting with path scatter to shingle roofs with individual shingles, I've encountered some things that i believe would help quite a bit with art direction/work flow speed, also with performance when living within draw call budgets. (draw call budgets or methods used depending on scope and scale of a project) so what im about to explain is per my use case which is large scale with flexibility and control over art direction with just a few assets).
The goals of this is to completely get rid of tiling meshes. or provide the option of doing so.
Path scatter can snap to a surface, Which this is great, Makes it perfect for putting shingles on a roof, While providing degrees of control one would want with some rotational jitter and rotational overrides to overlap and help follow the geometry of the surface used for projection.
- The problem(s) with using it for a case like this, or even fences or other various man made constructions.
-Currently i believe when it populates mesh along the spline It just does so outta random from the array of meshes in the tool. Meaning if we only have 4/5 meshes to work with. going through 1000s of different seeds is near impossible to stop it from putting the same mesh besides itself, sometimes 2-4 times in a row (not ideal for edge break up or tiling textures).
You could just feed it 10-15 meshes and significantly lower the odds of two of the same meshes being generated beside each other and make scrubbing through different seeds fast. This would be completely fine especially if you were going to merg actors after or MshMrg etc. Completely valid approach. Except this approach is only good for small scale. When you have 50 buildings with different levels of weathering and decay, Even trying to go modular with it results in significantly more draws, Unless you merged quite a bit more meshes but texel density would be awful, and more draws etc.
The feature request is to have an option (you wouldn't want it to always do this). that would keep it from choosing itself from an array if an instance of itself exists in the previous order it was generated in. Idk how the tool is made etc so the logistics of getting it to work idk. This would be great, especially if we still had control over the seed to dial it in.
Another feature request would be expanding on Rotation Overrides.
The idea behind this one is simple, We want it rotated -90, But we also would like some jitter so within a range of -90 to -100. Further giving more control over the art direction.
The last feature request is Jitter on the projected points. Right now the splines just project along the line of the spline the pivot is right on it, or under it if projecting. Being able to apply jitter to this would be extremely beneficial for breaking up hard edges. it would be nice to be able to move it -5 to 5cm off center.
Hopefully this makes sense as to why I'd like these features and why it would be worth it to add them into the tool. Because we can't always just merg actors down, From a visual quality standpoint and that if you do it way to much you defeat the purpose and quadruple your draws on a large scale especially when everything is quite unique. -Side note, Even if you were merging things down into one mesh, this has its use cases in situations, This would drastically decrease manual intervention.
Thank you for your time who ever reads this! Take care 😄
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