Is there a way to get the foliage painting tool to place a single object with each click?

Development World Creation
, ,
1

I’d like to use the foliage tool to quickly align a single mesh to another static mesh each time I click on it. I’ve messed around with the settings, but I can’t quite get it working. Basically what I am trying to do is use the foliage tool as a prop placement tool for non organic scenes, so I can say select a small prop I want to place in the scene multiple times and then each time I click the surface of my scene I get that prop placed once with random rotation, scale, and aligned to render mesh of the surface.

2

Hi malcolm341,

If you change the Landscape Painting Density on the object to around 50 and the Ground Slope to 180 it seems to get the effect you want. Also adjust the brush size down to only the area that you want to cover. Almost every click will produce just one mesh.

Thanks, TJ

7509-ahub_landscapepaintingperclick.jpg
7509-ahub_landscapepaintingperclick.jpg1528×854 305 KB

3

That’s great thank you, if you set the density to 3000 or higher it looks like you get one for every click.

Next question, how do I stop the random jitter from happening in the translation when they get placed. Even if I set random yaw to off and radius to 0.0 painting a straight line of props is impossible, it wants to move them around randomly. Do you know what setting turns off this random jitter to the position.

7527-jitter.jpg
7527-jitter.jpg1604×982 347 KB

4

Unfortunately there isn’t a setting to toggle that. It’s coded to jitter because it’s really just meant for landscape foliage.

The only possible workarounds I know are:

  1. If you are using Source you could alter the code in the Foliage Tool.
  2. Make a spline that follows the path you want and create meshes along it, but that wouldn’t give you the effect of placing them on other meshes like you want.
  3. Create a Blueprint placing them along a set path, but you will have the same issue as #2.
  4. And of course the more time consuming option of placing the meshes by hand.
5

Could we add that as a feature request, the ability to toggle the jitter on and off. Placing objects this way is a common practice in Maya using a plugin called spPaint3d.

6

Hi malcolm341,

Thank you for the feedback, I can see how this could be useful in certain situations. The developers will take this into consideration.

Thanks, TJ

7

it also would be great to be able to bake foliage stuff back to objects or group of objects.

The idea of being able to control a bit beter what you want to do with the objects you created with this tool would also be great… it seems that folliage tool is very limited and doesnet share any “object” characteristics…