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Author Topic: instancing and mirroring ...  (Read 4773 times)

lukx

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instancing and mirroring ...
« on: March 19, 2014, 09:58:26 AM »
Recently I'm building stadium after stadium and my workflow is that I create half of the stadium and than I use 3dsmax mirror and instance on railclone object to make other half (this way I can have just one spline to control everything). The problem is that after this I need to select both raiclone objects and again mirror them together because otherwise they are (inside out). Is there any way to avoid such thing in future builds?

iToo

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Re: instancing and mirroring ...
« Reply #1 on: March 19, 2014, 01:11:09 PM »
By default, RailClone tries to keep its geometry aligned with the referenced spline. This may generate strange results on instanced objects, since both generate the same geometry but their positions are different.

To solve this limitation, we have introduced a new parameter RC 2.2: Style->Free Object. When enabled, it's possible to create instances of a RC object and move them freely.

By the way, RailClone already includes a mirroring feature, although it's available only for the L1S generator.
Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

Adam86

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Re: instancing and mirroring ...
« Reply #2 on: February 20, 2018, 11:43:54 AM »
Hi, I had the same problem so I used the 'free object' tick box, however this automatically moved the mesh to a random place in my scene, I then had to manually reposition it back, what is causing this to happen in the first place?

It also displays unusual or missing parts of my more complex systems like roofing / clipping - I think this is because I am using the spline as a clipping area for the tiles part - How can I get around this as I effectively want to have a house which is grouped full of rail clones / objects and reference them around a scene without having all the rail clones go crazy on me - as an update to the software can we not include any clipping splines as part of the 'free object' selection? It can still be affected by the orginal Spline however I could freely move copys of the roof without line work? I effectively only want one original house type to define all of it's copys.
« Last Edit: February 20, 2018, 12:11:45 PM by Adam86 »

Michal Karmazín

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Re: instancing and mirroring ...
« Reply #3 on: February 20, 2018, 03:37:30 PM »
Hi Adam, 

Though when using the Free Object option, the RailClone ignores the spline's position being still deformed by its shape (which allows you to move the RailClone geometry freely in the scene – based on the RC's Pivot Point position), the Clipping Area is still being calculated upon the world spline position. We’ll check what can be done in future versions.

For this kind of purposes, you might consider using the "Style Linking" feature (it allows you to link the RC object to another, so the Style changes done on Master are dynamically reproduced on Slave(s)).  As mentioned in our on-line reference guide: "Parameter values are copied from the master as well, except those that have been modified by the user. In that way, you can have several RailClone objects, all controlled from a single master style, but each with independent local settings. This mechanism works in the same way than Library/Copy Style operations, and the behavior can be modified from "General" settings."

In case, you’re interested in instancing the “source RC object” without modifications, using the Forest Pack plug-in to distribute these might be the preferable option.

Hope that helps.

Best regards,