SurfaceSPREAD Object

 The SurfaceSPREAD Object is at the heart of the plugin. It has some similarities to that of a MoGraph cloner object in that child objects are cloned on to a reference object. That´s pretty much where similarity ends as the SurfaceSPREAD Object is more about distributing clones in a manner suitable for landscapes e.g. cloned trees can´t be placed on steep faces. Let´s have a closer look at some of the settings.

General Tab

The basic usage of a SurfaceSPREAD Object consists of placing one or more objects to be cloned as child objects of the SurfaceSPREAD object. You then have to drag and drop a polygon based target object into the object field. Child objects of the SurfaceSPREAD Object are then cloned on the surface of the target object. The default mode is Clone on Polygons. This places the clones randomly but you can have it similar to MoGraph and have a clone at the centre of each polygon by changing the Clone On mode to Polygons (Centered). In this mode the number of clones option is ignored.

Objects are positioned on the target object based upon where their axis is. With trees for example you will want to place the axis at or near the bottom of the trunk although there is an offset parameter on the Effects tab to move the clones around. Typically with trees you made need to adjust the offset so that the trunk goes into the ground slightly. Here´s a simple scene with a tree cloned on to a SPREADscape Object (SurfaceSPREAD´s terrain object).

Basic usage of SurfaceSPREAD Object

As mentioned the default mode Clone on Polygons places clones randomly. In this mode you can adjust the number of clones. If you don´t like the randomness then it´s just a matter of changing the Distribution Seed until you get something that you are happy with. Once you start increasing the number of clones the viewport navigation can begin to get sluggish. Like the SplineSPREAD plugin there is an Editor Weight option. What this does is reduce the number of clones visible in the viewport so navigation speed remains quick. The clones are just hidden and are still there when you come to render.

In addition to the Editor Weight option you can also make the clones display either normally, as solid shaded boxes or as wireframes. I found working with wireframe with lots of the clones the best option for me. Lastly there are some Caching options that affects how the SurfaceSPREAD object constantly recalculates the clones when you do something like navigate in the viewport. The default mode is Automatic. Recall what happens in C4D when you have a few boolean objects. Viewport navigation will slow down as the booleans are constantly being recalculated. These options are all much better than anything MoGraph has to offer to improve viewport navigation and I think MAXON should implement some of these performance tweaks. Plus there´s more that I´ll come to later.

The virtual parent option is so that if you make the SurfaceSPREAD object editable rather than the SurfaceSPREAD object changing into a Null Object and the clones as child objects, the SurfaceSPREAD changes into whatever object you dragged into this field. Note that this does make a copy of the object used so you may want to delete the original. This option can also be used when using the Wire Object and I´ll explain how later.

One thing to note is that by default clones point upwards. This means if you clone onto a sphere for example you would need to change the alignment to Normal to make the trees align in the direction of the polygon normal´s. I´ll cover the Alignment Tab later although there´s not much to mention as there´s only a couple of options.

At the bottom of the General Tab there is a Clone Count. This is the number of clones visible in the viewport. So if you have 1000 clones and have the Editor Weight set to 10% then the count will be 100. However when you render you get all 1000 clones being rendered. What I wouldn´t mind seeing here is 2 figures. One the number of editor clones and the second the number of rendered clones. The number of rendered clones can be different than the number of clones defined by the Maximum clones option due to some of the distribution options that I´ll be coming to shortly. I did mention this to Frank the plugin developer and he says although it would be possible there could be quite a performance hit.

Instances

On the General Tab there are options for instances. This is important. The default mode is no instances. Clones are treated like actual objects. If you make the SurfaceSPREAD object editable you get a null object with polygon objects as child objects. By enabling the Instance option, if you were to make the SurfaceSPREAD object editable you would get a Null parent object, the original object then as instance objects. Pretty boring so far. Here´s the ultra cool part. Release 11.5 now has Render Instance objects. These coupled with the new bucket rendering in R11.5 allow many more and I mean lots more polygons to be rendered. These have some similarity to V-Ray proxies that you can use instead if you have V-Ray and they are similar to modo´s Replicators.

I strongly urge people who want to get the best out of this plugin to upgrade to Release 11.5 if you haven´t done so already. The "Use Render Instance" option makes a huge difference to what can be rendered and what can´t. Here´s one of sample scenes that you can download from the plugin developer´s site. I have added a few more trees and increased the number of clones. With Render Instances disabled I get a "Not Enough Memory" error.

Render Instances allow many more clones to be rendered

If you have V-Ray then instead of Render Instances you can use V-Ray proxies. These are a C4D object converted to a V-Ray proxy object and loaded by the V-Ray render engine at render time. I gather that V-Ray proxy objects are superior to the native Render Instance in that more clones can be rendered.