Random Arrangement of Items?

Deke

Is there a simple way to scatter or arrange a lot of items. I'm trying to make a pile of boulders. I could pile them up individually, but thought there may be a better solution.

SixDs

Well, technologically, I believe that the answer is yes. However, the algorithm would need to be complex well beyond what one might first imagine. The placement of your boulders within a defined space in a random fashion would not necessarily be the difficult part by itself - that could be done by defining spatial limits and using some sort of random number generator to assign each boulder a position. Even if all your boulders were exactly the same size and shape, there would be problems with overlap that would need to be addressed through some sort of collision algorithm. And, of course, that difficulty would be compounded by boulders of varying sizes and shapes. Then there is the question of orientation. Will this be predetermined or will an algorithm be required to define how irregular boulders will "fit" with others. In the real world piles of boulders are not as random as they might seem. Physics plays a large role in how they are arranged. The exercise is by no means simple or something that one could solve quickly or easily. A physics engine might do the job, but would still require a great deal of user input in terms of the placement of individual boulders, and would not necessarily yield real world results. You could try playing with dForce to see what happens, dropping different boulders of different sizes from different locations, but I'm not certain how dForce deals with hard body objects since it is primarily designed for cloth simulation.

Richard Haseltine

There's UltraScatter, for Instances, but it won't stack