Sprite Trees

[unafraid]

Hi,
I was wondering how you would go about orienting the bottom of a sprite to the geometry surface normals. I am trying to populate a terrain with sprite trees but the problem I am having is the trees go through the terrain and appear underneath the surface right now. Any help would be great! Thanks.
Jeremy

[gmask]

is the center of the sprite intersecting the surface? Can you have the image only occupy the upper half of the sprite?

Otherwise can you offset the position of the sprite to be above the surface a uniform amount but just moving the particle object up in space.

[unafraid]

QUOTE(gmask @ 08/11/08, 09:54 AM) [snapback]289518[/snapback]
is the center of the sprite intersecting the surface? Can you have the image only occupy the upper half of the sprite?

Otherwise can you offset the position of the sprite to be above the surface a uniform amount but just moving the particle object up in space.

Yes, it looks like the center is intersecting, however I couldn't find an offset attribute in the particle shape? I guess I could occupy only the top half with the image but I'd love to know how to offset the sprites. Or change the center point to be at the bottom of the sprite.

[gmask]

when I said offset I meant by selecting the particel object and moving it up.. as far as I know you can't offset the sprites.. you'd probably have to use the particle instancer

[toast--2]

I've found a good workflow is to use paint effects (poplarBackground brush), then convert them to poly's. Extract them so they're all seperate objects then change their sizes and put on your own texture. Don't delete their history.

After this align the pivots to the bottom of the objects and use LevelTools to snap the billboards to the ground using the snap to geo command, you can also have the option of snapping them with a constraint so they always stick to the ground mesh. The sprites will always follow the camera too.