Adressing specific part in Railclone object trough distribution map FP object

[Pixual]

I'm facing something I don't understand completely. I'm building a parametric front yard for several connected houses in a row. It's build with a pathway, a terrace and in between the seperate yards some hedges (made of boxes like your tutorial 'Creating hedges and topiary With Forest Pack in 3ds Max' shows). It's all in one big Railclone script because I would like to parameterize as much as possible.

When adding a forest pack object for the hedges however, I run into the area selection of the hedge. For other parts which use XY surface mode I just use a Material ID to select the parts I would like to use (the grass for example). As a workaround I used a gradient map in the distribution slot, but the problem with that is that it's not fully parametic beacause I have to manualy place the geometry out of the UV space (see attatchment). I tought of making a multi-sub material to make a white color for the selected object (on that material ID) and black for all the other objects, but Forest Pack doesn't take that kind of maps. I'm not sure why. So that's my first question, is it something to add for a future release or are there technical problems holding you back?

And second question, is there another way to make this work parametric within the one script I already got? Or is there a way to conncect two seperate Railclone objects so it still works as a parametric whole?

Thanks in advance!

Jakob de Vries

[Rokas]

Hi
I can only advise using RailClone for hedges instead of FP.
Create few hedges models and variate them.

[Paul Roberts]

If the front yards are all flat, how about using the Limit by Altitude feature in Forest Pack's Surfaces rollout to stop the hedge geometry from scattering on the lawns?

Cheers,

Paul

[Pixual]

Thanks Rokas and Paul for the good suggestions! For my situation, Pauls option works most scalable but when adding other 3D objects (like benches on the terrace or some fences instead of hedges) it will fill them up with forest objects too. Any idea's on how to exclude them from the forest object while still being able to parametrically scale the yards?

Many thanks!
Greetings, Jakob.