Forest Edge with Manual Item Placement

[CM1251]

Hi all,

I wanted to know if this was possible already or if it could be implemented in a future version.  I'm basically looking for the Edge Trimming mode to be available for manually placed items. This would be particularly useful when we have ornamental grasses (where the blades stick out a bit) against glass railings or solid walls, but the blades then pierce through the walls/railings. I know you can set up a CoronaDistanceMap in the opacity slot and do it that way, but if you have a lot of models, each with 3-10 sub-materials, it will get laborious fast and difficult to manage. Not to mention slow, as I find the distancemap isn't the fastest feature.

I suppose the Spline Repulsion effect could work in this instance but sometimes I'd like to cut the extraneous geometry with the tried-and-true Forest Edge map modifier. I know the area rollout is typically greyed out/locked when using manual placement mode but I hope there's a way in the future (or now) to have Area splines influence manually placed objects.

Thanks,
Tanner

[iToo]

Hi,

I'm afraid Edge mode is not compatible with Custom Edit.

Trimmed edges are computed using the distance to the spline, but items on Custom Edit are independent, and not checked with splines or other area elements.
They use a completely different workflow, compared with the generated items.

[CM1251]

Hi Carlos,

I'm well aware of the different workflows, my hope (or feature request) is that a similar tool to the Edge mode for generated areas is built for item placement.  Right now, you can achieve a similar effect with the Corona Distance Map slotted into each opacity slot of every material of every object but that would take ages.

I tried the Repulsion by Spline effect and that only pushed the forest items away along the X/Y.  I feel like it shouldn't be that difficult to introduce void areas into placed items, where closed splines indicate regions where the forest items should not be visible, much like an inverse of the edge mode for areas now.

[iToo]

Perhaps it could be done using a specific Effect. Although that requires some code changes, because currently Effects cannot handle edge elements.

We'll take a look to it. Added to the wishlist.