- [Voiceover] To conclude our chapter on
camera and scene layout, we will add some ferns
to the rock face using the ecosystem painter tool.
Let's use the perspective camera for that.
Double click on the main camera view and then double click
on the perspective to maximize it.
It will be easier for us to see what we're doing
if the object is selected in advance.
Click to select the rock face, and I'll go into
the ecosystem painter tool, and it's found here
on the control bar, paint on global ecosystem.
The ecosystem painter dialog opens up.
The first thing to do is to add something to the population
down here, scroll down to the bottom,
and let's click on add plant.
Once again we're taken to our plants browser
and I've got the content files distributed by e-on software
installed and in the grasses plants tab
we can find the fern, here it is fern.
Click on that, it's added to the ecosystem population.
We can choose its display quality here from this button,
right click on that previewing mode button,
and instead of shaded billboard let's choose billboard.
With the fern added to the ecosystem population
we can go back up to the top and you can see that
the painting mode is on by default and we wanna make sure
that the populate brush is active.
Hairbrush is on, we've also got a limit
to the overall density of 50%.
This means if we hold down the mouse button, or stylus,
we will get more and more instances
up to a certain limit of 50%.
I can go back over to the main window
and then just click and I'll create a fern or two,
and getting closer with the mouse wheel
and the size of the brush is based upon screen space.
If you want a larger area then you can increase
the brush radius, and then zoom in or out in your view pot
to encompass the area that you want.
Those are your two parameters there, the brush radius,
and then your overall distance.
If I just click once I'll create numerous instances there.
We want to create these ferns in places that seem natural,
the flat areas on tops of the rocks.
Once we got a few in there we can move them around
if we wish and that's done pretty easily
because we got a move tool here.
It might be easier to see that if we turned off
this preview display entirely back down.
In our ecosystem population we can right click
on the previewing mode and choose none,
and now they're showing up just as dots.
In this mode I can choose the move tool
and get in pretty close on these with the wheel.
With that move tool active click directly on one of these
little points and drag it.
It's a little bit problematic sometimes especially
if you got these guys that are really close together
and you may have performance issue but you do have
the ability to move these around.
If you want to delete them then you go into
a different mode, and that's up here.
Click on the next to the left most button
because that is the selection of the instances.
Once you're in this mode if dselect is turned off
and your brush covers one of those dots, then it's selected.
If dselect is enabled then
you can erase from that selection.
We can of course create selections and select and dselect
all from this panel as well.
I just wanna select one of these here with dselect
turned off of course and then once that's highlighted
in red I can delete it by pressing
the delete key on the keyboard.
Then just a few of these for demonstration purposes,
let's see what we get in a render, before we exit out of
this tool we do wanna remember to disable any modes up here.
None of these are highlighted,
then close the ecosystem painter, go back out to our
camera view, maximize that, and just render a basic preview.
Here is a preview rendering showing that we do have some
ferns here on that surface, we want to devote some more time
to that, go back into the ecosystem painter dialog and
add more instances and position them more precisely.
That's the basics of using an ecosystem painter tool
and that wraps up our chapter on camera and scene layout.