Please make sure your version of blender matches the version of the plugin you are installing.
for compatibility information about our plugin, please read the release notes page.

Try to quit your blender app & restart.

Are you on MACOS? this is probably an unzipping issue   

Please verify in your outliner if some of your scatter-collections are not hidden.  ( Make sure to enable all outliner restriction filters, in blender, there are many ways an object can be hidden in the outliner, most of the time this is done by mistakenly hitting the horizontal numberpad of your keyboard )

In "Tweak>Distribution" make sure that the distribution density is not too small relative to the size of your terrain

You might want to apply your terrain scale, perhaps it is very big. Alternatively in "Tweak>Scale>DefaultScale" you could set the default scale reference to "global"

Please verify if your system(s) are visible in "Npanel>Tweak>SystemList". You should see a screen icon activated.

Please verify if your scatter-system has any designated instances. In "Npanel>Tweak>Instancing". No instances equal nothing displayed.

Please disable all features, perhaps one of them is not tweaked correctly and therefore masking out everything.

• Most of the time the ecosystems feature might be the culprit, if you create relations with a system hidden or that does not exist anymore.

• A visibility feature might be responsible.

• The pattern feature might mask an unusually large area.  

Please make sure your version of blender matches the version of the plugin you are installing.

• Did you have a forward compatibility issue perhaps?
  Please be careful when switching blender version while working on your projects, it could corrupt them forever. 

By default the scatter will be parented to your surface(s), it means that if your surface has a scale of [100,100,100], your scattered instances will be x100 as larger than the scene unit. To resolve this issue you have two possible solutions:

• Apply the scale of your surface with CTRL+A

• Set your scatter default scale to "global" space instead of the "local" surface space, this is located in "Tweak>Scale>Default Scale".

Make sure the scale of the instances you chose is set to [1,1,1] (to easily retrieve your original instance go in "Tweak>Instancing" & click on the select icon).

Make sure you are working in the correct scene scale, blender beginners often forgot to follow blender native scape, 1 blender unit is 1 meter.

Optionally you can change the default scale of your instance in "Tweak>Scale>Default Scale"

If the scattered instances are not displaying an accurate color, that's probably because you did not create the shaders of the objects scattered, is that correct? If the objects you are using are indeed created by someone else, the shaders surely rely on the display color blender property to drive the color in render, this is possible thanks to the object info node used by Cycles/Eevee render engines. 

In Geo-Scatter you are able to tweak the display color of your scatter via 'N Panel > Geo-Scatter > Tweaking > System(s) List'.
Please consult the creator of the model used to verify if/how the display color property is being used.  If you are using botaniq, consult this page.

As you may know, the Geo-Scatter plugin is based on the very efficient "Geometry-node" system. Geometry-node may vary from one blender version to another, meaning that it is important to be careful when changing blender versions, please take the following pieces of advice into consideration when switching from one blender version to another:

• First of all, please be aware that changing your software version mid-project is a bad demeanor in the CG industry, regardless of our plugin. Please avoid doing so or you will have problems sooner or later,  always prefer using the same version of your software from the beginning to the end of your project. Make sure to document which software version your project was made in to avoid corrupting any blender files by opening & saving your project in the wrong version. If you really need to upgrade your software version make sure to save a copy of your project beforehand. 

• Avoid at all cost forward-compatibility errors, or you might corrupt your project forever, as .blend files are not forward-compatible! Unsure what forward compatibility means? Here's an example: You are working on a project made in blender 3.2, and your collaborator join-in & starts to work on the same .blend file but in blender 3.4. A few days later you re-open your projects and surprise, all your shaders node-trees are corrupted, all color-mix nodes suddenly became "undefined", because the internal code of these nodes changed in blender 3.4.  In conclusion, never open & save a .blend file made in a newer version in an older version, manage your blender version clearly. 

• Please make sure the plugins you are using are compatible with your blender version. Do not assume a blender plugin is compatible with all blender versions, it is a common wrong assumption.

• When upgrading your Geo-Scatter plugin version, all scatter-system(s) you created with our plugin in your project will need to be updated. As we explained above it is not advised to switch your software version mid-project but if you really need to: click on the "update node-tree" button to update all internal geometry-node system(s) we are using.  Additionally, you are able to force update all node-trees in the Geo-Scatter plugin preferences, in the "debug" area. If you encounter errors while updating, restart your blender session. Still not working? Please contact us with a link to your file via the blendermarket direct-messaging system. 

We advise being more familiar with a native blender option called objects-displays. It is a very important optimization feature located per object properties, it will potentially save your computer from crashing.
The Geo-Scatter might enable this blender option automatically if the object you are trying to scatter is very heavy. If you do not like this security behavior you are able to disable it in 'N Panel>Geo-Scatter>Create',  in the behavior popover menu, located next to any creating operator button. 

If you're unsure where the original scattered objects are located in your scene, go in "NPanel>Geo-Scatter>Tweaking>Instancing" and click on the select icon to select the objects in your scene. Alternatively, you can hold ALT while doing so to recenter the view around the selection.
From there you will be able to edit the object in edit mode or change the object materials.

Please toggle the "Lock interface" option in the blender main header render menu.
Blender is a bit unstable when this option is not toggled, it does not tolerate python-interaction-related changes between frames otherwise.

It is very likely that you have a modifier on one of your surfaces that is changing its topology only in the render. In most cases, the culprit is a subdivision modifier!

• • Please make sure to have the same level of subdivision on  viewport & on render for your subdiv modifier.

  • Note that if your emitting surface is very high-poly, you could use a low-poly surface invisible on render only used for the scattering. This trick will be needed if you'd like to work with materials that have adaptive displacement enabled for example.

Perhaps you have a collection or an object in your scene with a different viewport/render state?

Perhaps you have an optimization feature on one of your systems enabled only for the viewport,  therefore is impacting the final-render?

Because any scatter-system can be read & rendered on any other PC without having the Geo-Scatter plugin installed, it shouldn't pose a problem to render your scene. However we do advise disabling any display or visibility optimization just in case. 

Note that any keyframe/driver animation will need our plugin to be activated. 

if you have any doubt, for a guaranteed result, use the "export as instance" functionality available in our plugin extra panel, this will non-destructively bake the scatter-system(s) as real blender instances.

Perhaps you are beginning in 3d & have false expectations about what blender/your computer is capable of doing? Unsure where to start? here are some questions you should ask yourself:

• Is your computer able to handle large blender 3D scenes? Did you ever work on large 3D scenes in blender/maya/3Dsmax in the past? Or perhaps this is your first time creating large scenes? Perhaps the slowdown is completely normal, your scene might just be really heavy for your computer.

• How many points are you initially scattering, more than a million? Is your scatter area very large?
  Solution: Use visibility optimization features, hide your unused scatter-system(s) in the viewport, separate your scatter-surface in foreground /middleground /background.

• Is there an extreme amount of triangles drawn on your screens? Blender is using rasterization to render the viewport, this rendering technique will scale depending on the number of triangles displayed. See basics of computer graphics.
  Solution: Use display optimization (display as point is the fastest option). hide your unused scatter-system(s) in the viewport.

• Is the surface you are scattering upon high poly? perhaps with heavy-to-compute modifiers enabled?
  Solution: Use a low poly invisible surface only used as a scattering surface, you can keep your high poly mesh for the rendering.

Note that some features might be slower than others! For example:

• The random distribution mode with limit distance enabled is slower than the original random distribution mode

• Any features using proximity calculation such as "Tweak>Proximity" or "Tweak>Ecosystems" are computer intensive, especially when calculating proximity with high poly meshes.

• Display as convex-hull, bounding-box, or point-cloud might be more computer-intensive, as these methods will be constructing the display object on the fly.

If you believe your scene is unusually slow compared to a native blender environment scene, please contact us maybe you found a bug! Our plugin is/shall be highly optimized and we did an abundance of research on the subject.