[REQ] Recursive skattering

I often need to have multiple arrangements of scattered objects. I’d really like to define an arrangement once and copy it to different locations in the scene rather than re-creating it in each location. In essence, I want to use a Skatter render-scene as the scattered object in a new Skatter render-scene.

For example, I made a lot of money recently - billions of dollars in fact. I used Skatter to construct a nice stack of $1bn in $100 bills. I wanted to create many of these stacks. It would have been useful to use the base arrangement (the $1bn stack) as the scattered object in a new arrangement.

What would be even better would be if the copied billion-dollar stacks could have their own random values (that is - the same parameters as the original stack, but a different random seed).

I love Skatter and use it all the time.

This is something we’ve been considering for a while. We’re not sure how to do this, though.
What’s for sure is that it won’t be in v2.0, but maybe a later update.

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Cant this already be done in a way. I remember a SU tut which makes bushes using a skatter object as base.

I believe this one

If you make a single object. I believe you can then skatter it. Its been a while since ive dont this one.
though. I did make a scene, ill check if i still have this and see if this indeed has sub models. I belive thats what you’re after rigth?

You can duplicate the group/component created with skatter with right click, then rightclick again and choose duplicatie skatter. That should work, you also would need to copy the base, so perhaps group/component them into 1. I cant really recall how i done this part.

yes it can if you generate in the model. But for now there is no way to nest “Render only” compositions.

Well we have the option duplicate skatter group. But it will jump back to the original group. Thats a bit tedious but a logical step. Of that part could be fixed making alterations could be faster i guess.

Its the same when you loose a group or base, you cant fix it. We get a error message and than bamm gone are all your settings.

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You should be able to edit the setup and pick a new host.

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Yes that would be great, because this happened a couple times to me. There is no way to fix this error warning now. The same as a skatter object is lost, if we would be able to point a new host or skatter object. This would fix that very nice. This would also mean that duplicating a skatter setup/group would be much easier.

I think it will be a step forward to this sub-skatter setting method i think.

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