TUTORIAL3
RandomCloner and TerrainMaker.

My Friend Radoslaw 'REDO' Nowakowski created this great chocolate bar with just few clicks! He has allowed me to show how he did it.

This tutorial show the simplicity and power of RandomCloner and TerrainMaker.

Lets start with the peanuts. There are two different models of the peanuts, both are made from simple nurbs patches.

With RandomCloner you can simply make a lot of copies of one object on the surface of the other. Random rotations and jitter of clones gives very natural look.

For this purpose the peanut should be cloned on a simple bar shaped quad. I made 35 clones with 25% size variations. With:
H(-180,180)
P(-30,30)
B(-30,30) settings.

Put the object to be cloned in a background layer. In the foreground use the object on which you need the clones.

Ok. One peanut is now cloned. On the same polygon I cloned the second peanut shape with a bit different settings and different 'Random Seed' to get peanuts in other positions than previous ones. There is no need to copy and paste the quad to new layer. RandomCloner will place clones only on selected polygons so just select the quad before cloning.

The second peanut model is not positioned exactly in the origin of the axis. Its pivot point is slightly moved outside its body. During cloning some of the clones are higher then other (it will give more natural look for finished bar) but also some clones are positioned outside the quad. You can manually delete undesired clones. For this cloning I used small values for Pitch angle limits to limit Y position of clones.

All of the clones are together. The peanuts look ready. I've manually adjusted some of the clones to get better overall look.

RandomCloner saved us a lot of work! You can of course create a similar model without the plugin but it may be a more time consuming operation...

Now it is time to create the chocolate :-)
In the real chocolate bar there is more chocolate beneath each peanut. Peanuts are "glued" to bar by this.

Radoslaw decided to use my TerrainMaker to quickly and simply simulate this effect.

With the peanuts model in foreground layer start TerrainMaker. The plugin interface is very simple. You only have to set how many divisions (polygons) you want to get in each axis. The plugin will always create terrain in the XZ plane.

In this case I set grid to 90 polys in the X-axis and 30 in Z-axis.

Hmm.. the result don't look good.
TerrainMaker is slow - I know it - it was created only as a test and it is not optimised. If you think it is handy plugin and I should develop it a bit more drop me an e-mail.

First select the newly created object and cut+paste it to new empty layer.

Finished object. I spent about 10 minutes creating my chocolate bar trying to repeat his steps and the result was acceptable :-)

To create a similar object manually I would spend much more time...

Thank you very much Redo for this great object!