Before doing something else, in the Assembly room, switch to top view (in orthographic view), hide temporaly your replicator, and take a screenshot (PrintScreen on PC, or Command+shift+3 on Mac)
bellow is a sample of what you will capture. Paste or open your screenshot in an image editor, and we will go back to it later in this tutorial.
Next change to Director's Camera, unhide your replicator, and double click on it's name in the scene tree to edit its parameters.
In the screen capture bellow, several parameters have been changed.
1. The number of trees. In the scene that we want to build, don't create a forest of Palmtrees, it won't be coherent.
2. The random rotation. Only the X (blue) axis has been modified, the Palmtree will rotate around its own vertical axis.
3. A random scale has been applied, this way all your trees won't be the same size.
4. The Align object to normal checkbox has been unchecked this way the palmtrees will point towards the sky.
Don't forget to check in the Assembly preview on the bottom right of the Carrara interface to see what happen.
Go back briefly to the Assembly room. Notice that trees are still in the water. Go back to the Replicator parameters. On the left part of the window,In the section called Objects distribution, click on the checkbox "Use Shader" (circled in red). Check it to activate it and then, hit the Edit Shader button.
A window appears in the Shading room. This shader only applies to the replicator. It is not the shader applied to the terrain. You won't see this shader when you do your render!
The only thing we will need to change is the color settings with need to be black and white. Carrara will use the white part of the shader to duplicate on it, and it won't duplicate anything on the black part.
Choose, in order to "Color" (red circle), Texture Map (red arrow)
Now, it's time to go back to the screen capture of the terrain we made earlier. In photoshop (which I use), I'll draw in white where I want to have my Palmtrees and the other parts, in black. We don't need to be really accurate on this drawing, it's only for a distribution. In fact, only draw on the green part of the screencapture which fit the grass part of the islands.
For information, my texture is in 512x512 which is enough.
Bellow, on the left, the original screencapture, and on the right, the texture I made.
Load this texture in the Texture map window.
Close the shader window, and go back to the Assembly room. You will have this kind of result:
It looks a lot better. Notice that you may have some trees in the water even if you use your black and white texture:
Reasons why this may be so:
- Your texture isn't in the good orientation. You may have take your screenshot in a rotation of +/-90°, then, you applied your edited shader in a wrong orientation. In the Shader window, on the bottom left along your texture preview, click the small rounded arrow to rotate your texture (from one to three times)
- Your texture isn't fully in black and white. your black isn't completly black, but dark grey. Carrara only works with a real black color for no distribution. Make sure that is only Black & white not grey.