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Author Topic: Altitude range problem  (Read 1604 times)

Rawalanche

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Altitude range problem
« on: September 01, 2014, 10:37:35 AM »
I've discovered a strange behavior of altitude range. It seems it works in object's local space rather than the world space. Since ForestPack is mainly landscaping tool, i think altitude range should be expressed in world space, not local space. Most of the times you are building environments using multiple forest objects, so Altitude range should remain consistent across them.

Especially when the way ForestPack objects are created is done by clicking on the existing object to be used as a surface, instead of placing ForestPack helper into the scene. This will automatically align the local space of ForestPack helper to the distribution surface, and therefore adopt it's coordinates. As a result, if you create two different Forest objects on two different surfaces at different Z axis coordinates, setting Top and Bottom altitude will have very different meaning for each of them. That's not exactly intuitive.

iToo

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Re: Altitude range problem
« Reply #1 on: September 01, 2014, 04:51:26 PM »
By design, in Max all objects must work in local coordinates, except World-space modifiers.
Also local coordinates provides more flexibility, in case someone want to use the plugin in this way. Forest is used many times as a generic scatter, not only as a landscaping tool.

To use world coordinates, just select all your Forest objects, set Z=0 using Transform Type-In tool (F12) and rebuild with Display->Update All.
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

Rawalanche

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Re: Altitude range problem
« Reply #2 on: September 02, 2014, 09:22:04 AM »
Yeah, that makes sense, but still remains somewhat counter-intuitive.