Today we are looking at Scatter for the Godot Game Engine. Scatter is a Godot add-on that makes it incredibly easy to instance mesh objects in your game level. This makes level design tasks like placing grass, paths, fences, etc incredibly simple. Additionally Scatter supports instancing multiple meshes (think different tree meshes to make a forest) in the same scatter, excluding splines or points from being scatter targets and more.
Scatter is an open source project with the source code hosted on GitHub under the MIT open source license. The project is implemented as a simple Godot add-on, so simply clone the repository into your projects Addons folder (or create one if you don’t have one already). Next load your project, go to Project Settings, then Plugins and make sure Scatter is enabled.
Once scattered is enabled, you create a Scatter object. This is a spline path that defines the boundaries of the scatter object. You need to add a ScatterItem child to your Scatter, then add a MeshInstance to the ScatterItem. This mesh instance is the 3D model that will be “scattered” around the boundary defined by the Scatter path.
The creator of the Scatter add-on also created Concept Graph for Godot, an excellent procedural generation extension we previously covered here. You can learn more about Scatter for Godot and see it in action in the video below.