MegaScatter Nearly Ready

MegaScatter is a system that allows you to easily scatter any number of objects in to your scene into areas either defined by splines or by textures. You have complete control over how many objects of each type are added to the scene as well as how they are placed. You can define random rotation, scaling, offset values as well as color variation. Objects can be told to place them selves on any underlying terrain or collider objects and align themselves to that object. You can define limits such as the slope angle an object can appear on as well as a range of heights so you can easily have grass appear a low levels turning to rocks at higher levels. The scatter system can also be told which objects in the scene to not scatter on and how far away from those objects an item can be places. And objects can be told not to overlap themselves or other objects in the scatter layer.

Objects can be scattered either in the editor or can be scattered at run-time to the options you have defined. Scattered objects can either be scattered as copies of the objects themselves ot the system can be told to combine all the meshes to massively reduce the Draw Call count. Another great advantage of having the objects scattered at run-time is greatly reduced file sizes and loading times. The demo scene in the video is only 10Mb when the objects are scattered at run-time, the same scene produced normally would be 43MB not to mention the hours it would take to position the objects by hand.

And another great advantage of the scatter system is the scene can very easily be re scattered to suit different platforms or CPU usage without having to rebuild the scene or having etc in the editor.

Video of MegaScatter Scene

The demo scene just contains a simple terrain and a model of a house, everything else in the scene (apart from flying things) is added procedurally at runtime with MegaScatter using 1 simple flower object, 2 simple grass objects and 2 rock objects. All the color variations, scaling, rotation etc is handled by the system and at any time you could just say I want more or less objects and the scene will be repopulated for you. Even the data that drives the swaying plant shader is generated by the system with control over how the plants react.

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