automatically avoiding splines (e.g, roads) during foliage placement

The foliage spawner is very cool, and I also really like the landscape spline editor, which is intuitive and easy to use. Major kudos for all that! It’s great fun to use.

One thing I think would be helpful is a checkbox to have the foliage spawner automatically avoid the splined mesh areas. Right now, if I place a road across my landscape, the spawner puts trees all over it. I can remove them by hand, but they come back if i re-simulate the forest, so it isn’t a good approach if you will be adding new tree types and so on.

I’ve “solved” it by hand-placing a vast pile of foliage blocking volumes all along my road, but it’s a very labor intensive process and if I move the spline, the volumes won’t move with it.

I figure that the engine knows where the splines are anyway, so the spline could have an option to auto-block foliage generation as if I had placed blocking volumes by hand. (Ditto for grass, maybe).

Mulling that over a little more: the spline points have a side falloff distance now for conforming the landscape heightmap to the spline. Similarly, maybe they could have a “foliage blocking distance” measured from the center of the spline. 0 == no blocking == current behavior. >0 == block foliage generation from that horizontal distance from the spline center.