I posted an image that I started on last night. First of all I have to say that the replicators work great. However, I did run into a problem. Initially I created the landscape. Then I placed one plant. It was way too big. So I scaled it down in Assembly. That worked fine for just one of them.

However once I tried a surface replicator the plants were all hovering above the surface of the terrain instead of resting on the surface like the original. I looked in the PDF manual and it mentions spacing options. It says these should be adjusted based off of a non scaled object. That is when I figured it out.

So I unscaled the palm tree and they met the surface as they should. But now they were way too big. So I decided to scale up the terrain. Initially that worked, but then it was hard to get started on the atmosphere because the scale of the scene was off now, even though the palms looked right on the terrain, the terrain itself was way too large.

So I set the scale of the terrain back to normal. Then I went into the plant editor. From within there I adjusted the scale of the plant. That did the trick. Adjusting the scale that way does not mess up the placement of the objects on the surface.

So, in short, if you are using the surface replicator, make sure you "model" or create your objects at the proper scale. If you adjust the scaling in Assembly you will get either floating objects if you scale them down, or embedded objects if you scale them up.

Hope this helps someone. Cant wait to get home tonight and get some more time in on the image I am working on. BTW the terrain surfacing functions in Carrara are great. Especially the distribution functions. Here is another trick. When deciding where major changes in color should be, use bright colors at first. That way you can easily see where the areas start and end and how the altitude and slope influences are working. Once you have them done that way go in and fine tune each layer. That can save a lot of time. Especially when some layers are similiar to the next because it can be hard to tell where they start and stop and what if any affect your changes are having.

Message edited on: 11/23/2005 06:53