Using a railclone object surface for Forestpack

[AurelienH]

Hello Itoo's team !

I try to reproduce this kind of wall :


So I used railclone to create the corten parts, the concrete wall behind the plants, the gravels....
Now I want to use Forest to assign plants on the concrete wall surface.
It doesn't seam to work. In Forest, I tried to change the direction value in the surface rollout to normal(0)

I set the MtlID of the wall to 3. I try to change the Surf.Mat.ID from Areas rollout to 3 but didn't work. I then changed the Mode from XY to UV in the Surface rollout. It worked but Forest's' objects are on every part of the railclone object...

Do you have any advises ? Do you ever tried to use Forest pack on RC objects ?

Thanks !
Aurélien_

[Paul Roberts]

Hi,

This should be possible but there are just a couple of settings you may need to change.

- Using RailClone as a Surface in Forest Pack disables RailClone's instancing capabilities. This is only a problem if you're generating huge poly counts but in this case it seems like most of the high poly detail is beging done by Forest Pack so you should be ok. I often disable the instancing engine from RC's Display rollout, just to avoid any problems though it should happen automatically
- Don't forget that for Forest Pack to update after changes to RC you'll need to update the surfaces. You can turn on Auto to avoid having to do this manually each time you make a change.



- Finally, make sure that RailClone's Display mode is set to Mesh. If it's displaying boxes the Material IDs are not set correctly, which could be the problem in this case.

That should be all you need to use RC as a surface in FP. I hope that helps, please let me know if you have any further questions.

Many Thanks,

Paul

[AurelienH]

Thank you Paul for your advice.
I have got one more question. If I want to use Forest on a vertical surface from a Railclone object, how should I do ?
It looks like if you use XY mode you can apply forest just in the horizontal surface.
I attached a new picture.

Thanks !
Aurélien_

[Paul Roberts]

Hi Aurélien,

Probably the easiest way to do that is to make a custom black and white distribution map that works with the RailClone object's geometry. In the way you can choose exactly which parts of the RailClone object are used for Forest Pack items.

In the attached sample file you can see a gradient is used to restrict the scatter to only the extruded part. There may also be the possibility of using limit by Slope and Altitude to create a similar effect without needing maps, depending on the scene.



I hope that helps, please let me know if you have any further questions.

Many Thanks,

Paul