Asilefx - Ecosystem Design And Control Techniques

Understand how to design and animate ecosystems in Vue 8 & 7.5 using advanced functions and graphs. Learn to create real-world forest-growth along with precisely controlled distributions. Discover how you can manage your scenes more efficiently and setup LOD ecosystem zones.

Optimize file sizes and system resources with LOD (level of detail zones). Break apart ecosystem layers into static population, painted population, and dynamic population zones; preserve painted or modified static populations by defined the areas of the scene to remain populated during save operations and those to remain dynamic and populated at render time. Populate high-resolution instances in main areas of focus, while keeping areas with limited screen time efficiently managed.

Learn to use any object's vector output to dynamically control the altitude and falloff (fuzziness) range of ecosystem populations. Learn to create dynamic material graphs to directly control the maximum and minimum altitude extents of ecosystem layers. By simply adjusting any object's position in the scene you will be able to directly animate and manipulate any ecosystem population.
Grow a forest down a mountain and learn how you can eliminate the “pop-in” effect (objects appearing out of nowhere without transitions).

Learn to dynamically create a standard population, an extremely useful technique for populating within the camera frame extents without the need to “render populate”, or limit the range of Vue's dynamic population.

Drastically reduce render times and system memory usage by learning to create pseudo vegetation with low-res SolidGrowth objects. An amazingly efficient solution for fast motion shots, distant ecosystems, digital mattes, pre-viz, and foliage filler. Learn to render objects for use as billboards directly in Vue, or use photographic image maps and alphas to create your billboards. Then learn to customize and populate your ecosystems with the billboard technique.

Explore the use of dummy (null and non-rendering) objects in your ecosystem populations to control the placement and spacing of the rest of the population.
Use terrain slope and altitude to precisely control and manipulate ecosystem instances within material graphs.

Learn to minimize species usage with function controlled variables, and learn how you can use identical species files in the same population layer.

Plus many more techniques!