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Introduction General Tab Alignment Tab Distribution Tab Effects Tab SplineSPREAD Shader Documentation & Conclusion Distribution Tab
The Distribution Tab is where you define how objects or clones are distributed along the spline. The default settings is to spread them out evenly from the beginning of the spline to the end of the spline. Naturally this doesn't have to be the case and the first 2 settings Start and End allow for any combination of positions along the spline that you may want. One thing lacking with open splines is the ability for the objects or clones to go beyong the end of the spline in the direction that the spline is pointing in. Something that I would like to see. Below is an animation with both Start and End parameters animated. The increase in scale is done on the Effects tab with the scale effect.
Next down in the Distribution panel settings is Offset and Shift. Offset cycles the position of the objects or clones whilst maintaining the start and end position whereas Shift moves everything along the spline. You would likely use the Offset to get a particular object in a specific position if it was important. The Settings panel has more parameters to fine tune things. The Use Full Range option is used to distribute objects or clones along the entire length of the spline. The default option is disabled which leaves room for one more object or clone at the end of the spline. You would want to use this in modelling where you needed things distributed along the entire length of the spline. Uniform Distribution arranges objects or clones uniformly along the spline rather than having more of them being clustered around the bends in the spline. Think of adaptive spline types where there are more intermediate points around the bends and you will get the idea. One important setting is the Circular Offset which make the objects or clones once they reach the end of the spline loop round and start at the beginning again rather than just stopping at the end. It is enabled by default. Below is a good example of the Circular Offset in action. In this case it is being used in place of particles as it is a lot easier to control the trajectory of the spent cartridge cases (which is done using scattering which I will come to soon).
So far our objects or clones have pretty much been evenly spaced on the path spline. This doesn't need to be the case and that's where the Random parameters on the Distribution Tab come in. These settings help to make things look a lot more natural especially in animations where some variation is required. The amount of randomness is in the first instance controlled by the slider which increase the strength. You can for example have the slider on zero strength which makes the clones all evenly spaced. Dragging the slider to the right increases the random spacing between objects or clones. Then the Noise amount defines how chaotic the randomness is and the Multiplier amount just increases the effect and negative values can be used to reverse the direction of the randomness. Note that Randomness is in both directions so if the multiplier was on 1 a specific clone would move one way then if the multiplier was instead -1 the same clone would move the opposite direction. The Curve which is below the Random settings. When the curve is a straight line with only 2 points the curve behaves just the same as the 2 Start and End sliders. However by adding one or more points and making the curve not straight / not linear i.e. the curve becomes curved then you can get more control than the 2 Start and End sliders and what you can do is make objects or clones as they move along the spline can be made to move faster around specific parts of the spline. The Curve in the image on the left results in the animation on the right.
As you can see the arrows go slower uphill and then speed up going downhill. By the way you don't have to use this in an animation. These settings that control distribution can be used to adjust object / clone spacing in static scenes. The Automatic Animation panel of settings is where you can enable automatic animation. We've already seen this in action in most of the sample animations in earlier parts of the review. The default setting is off so that when you press the play button, objects or clones are static. By enabling automatic animation the objects or clones move around the spline. The animation can be applied to the Offset or Shift that I mentioned a few paragraphs before. You can define the Frame Start and Frame End manually or you can press the Get Frames From Scene to get and use the scene start and end frames. There is a Clamp option and when enabled can be used in conjunction with the Frame Start and Frame End settings to make the objects only move between these 2 frame settings. The Create Loops button when pressed takes the number of loops from the Loops field and change the value in the Offset End field which in turn make the objects or clones loop around by that amount. e.g. Scene animation length is 0 to 90 frames. By default the number of loops is 1 so each object or clone moves around the spline once in this time. Change the Loop field to 5 and press the button. The objects or clones now move around 5 times faster / loop 5 times in the same number of frames. Lastly at the bottom of the Automatic Animation panel is another Curve field. This is essentailly a Time curve so you can adjust the curve to make the animation of the objects or clones go in reverse, slow down, speed up etc. Introduction General Tab Alignment Tab Distribution Tab Effects Tab SplineSPREAD Shader Documentation & Conclusion Review by 3DKiwi / Nigel Doyle |
