Creating piles
Sylvan
Posts: 2,719
I have been looking into this for some time now but I keep ending up at dead ends. I am looking for a way to create piles in DS of rocks, leaves or whatever else that needs to be stacked. Anyone find a good way to do this within DS? I have Stack em up, but that creates neat rowes, while I am looking for something to create random piles of stuff.
Post edited by Sylvan on

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I think HowieFarkes was working on some extension of Ultra scatter but I don't know to which state that developed by now.
Alternatively did you try to use dforce? I don't know if one can use instances in dforce.. that would be interesting to test. But with rocks that could work. For leaves I dimly remember a product using dforce I think this one https://www.daz3d.com/sy-dforce-confetti-and-nature-effects maybe there are others.
Thanks! I managed to makes leave piles, but anything that's hollow inside (such as rocks), collapses. I have Ultra Scatter but wasn't aware there is an extension in the making :D Now I am making instances, grouping them and then potitioning them by hand, but because of that, there's clipping but it's too tedious to pose all the props one by one, especially if you have hundreds of them Oo
can't you make the rocks all stiff so they don't collapse?
But yeah sometimes there is no way around the manually placing
For that you need the physics and the collision detection system.
I have done that in Unity game engine, exported from it as a Collada file and then imported such file to the Daz Studio.
I know, it is not what you want directly, but it is a great opportunity to learn something about game engines.
other programs include Blender. - Free
paid, Carrara, iClone, Poser with physics python or a version with bullet
and of course all the pricier ones like Max, Maya etc
The rocks won't collapse if you set the dforce gravity to -1.00. Also try making them very stiff so that they don't deform much.
Laurie
Below is a pile of stones created in Unity.