Conveniently Strewing Objects Around A Landscape

[cameronwalser]

Hi guys-

Anyone know of a quick way to chuck a whole bunch of objects around a landscape, besides turning them all into rigid bodies? I have a large hillside, and i want to pepper it with rocks and logs. I know one way to achieve what i want is to arrange them all above the landscape, turn them all into rigid bodies, apply gravity and drop them, then delete the rigid bodies, but it seems like there must be some modeling feature that allows you to move things and stop when they collide- i feel like there was some software program (maybe electric image?) that permitted you to hold the "C"button when you moved things and they would stop when the object would penetrate another...

any ideas?

i'll probably just try the first method- it won't take tooooo long, just feels inefficient....

thanks!!

[toast--2]

There are various random scatter scripts on this site. Which work well on the x and z axis (I use it for trees mostly), but I can't work out the Y axis - what your talking about. I've had to manually line up the trees so they just intersect and sit on top of the landscape mesh, which takes ages.

I wish there was an easier way too.

[mayacner]

Maybe you could try to randomly place the particles on the landscape surface,it's straightforward and use the instance to place your models

[joojaa]

or use paint objects artisan tool. Anyway collision doesnt get faster just because its in tool form its on avreage with same methodology as fast as a dynamic sin as it would be as a tool.

This does not mean it couldn't be improved, its juts that computers don't see collisions, They don't sense interpenetration. Even if it can draw 2 objects interlacing does not eman it knows they are, Now collision is quite expesnise especially iff you let people use arbitrarily complex stuff. Not to mention friction.

[toast--2]

That's a nice solution, but what happens if you have placed - say Billboard trees exactly where they should be on the x and z coordinates for their real world counterparts? But obviously the y axis is different because of hills and dips etc...

How do you mass align 600-700 objects on the y axis to just intersect or sit on the ground mesh?

[joojaa]

Do a for loop.

Or use flood in artisan.

[toast--2]

QUOTE(Joojaa @ 04/21/08, 09:16 PM) [snapback]284478[/snapback]
Do a for loop.

Sorry joojaa, but I'm not sure what you mean?

QUOTE(Joojaa @ 04/21/08, 09:16 PM) [snapback]284478[/snapback]
Or use flood in artisan.

Do you mean the paintGeometry tool? That seems to be a good solution...

But the thing is that I'm using billboard trees. I can paint perfectly onto geometry with say cubes or any other shapes but as soon as I use cards (ie planes), it never wants to paint onto the ground surface and instead it gets randomly placed floating around my scene.