First part: support basics.
Just as the name of the tool implies, the replicator needs... a surface!
For this tutorial, I'll use a scene wizard, made by Johannes (feel free to visit his gallery in this forum), called Dream Islands.
Below is a screen capture of this terrain in Carrara and the scene highlighted by a red circle. To open it, double click on the thumbnail (don't drag it in an empty Carrara assemble room., it won't work)
We will fill the terrain with palm trees. By using the tree generator
, we will create the palm tree. From the "Insert" dropdown menu select "plant" this will take you to the Tree editor.
The screencapture below shows you that the Palm tree preset is chosen, with the preview on the right. For advanced users, make sure not to check the "Show Leaves" and "Full Detail Mesh" (the two last checkboxes, on the bottom right) if you don't want to have a heavy scene and long rendering time when your scene is done.
Now close the window (to empty memory) and go back to the Assemble Room.
You may have something like that
Last thing to change in this first part: Your palm tree may be in the middle of the water, and too big, as the one in the screen capture. One of the most common mistakes of new Carrara users is to have a small terrain in contrast to the element(s) which are too big on the terrain. Like the palm tree for example.
Below you see the right result, the tree has been positioned and scaled correctly. You can do a small test render to see the result. Notice that placing objects from the camera, for the final composition may be better.
Now, it's time to replicate !