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ReferenceTree PropertiesAreaDistribution MapCameraSurfaceMaterialTransformDisplayFAQ

Surface

In the most of forest scenes, we will have not planar surfaces to place the trees, instead it we will have hills, mountains, etc. With this panel we can choose the surface to placing trees over it.

Pick / Clear / Update

With 'Pick' button we must choose the object scene which represents the terrain. The trees of Forest always are created in XY plane, so the terrain must be placed over this position and must be a simple mesh (we cannot use groups, etc.)

With 'Clear' button, terrain selection is cleared and all trees will back to XY plane.

If we modify the terrain, the objects will not adjusted automatically over the new surface, we must use the 'Update' button to inform to Forest the new situation. We know this may be a limitation for some scenes with animation of terrain, but it's implemented this way because Forest builds an internal table with the characteristics of terrain to optimize the speed when placing trees. So, it's possible to rebuild the trees in realtime with or without surface defined (over 50.000 trees/sec. in a Pentium II-350).

Anyway, this table is common for all Forest objects, so when we have using the same surface for several Forest objects only is necessary to use the 'Update' button in one of them. All trees are placed automatically.

 

Altitude Range

These parameters define the limits to place trees by height levels. When the 'Limited' checkbos is enable, only will be created trees in the range specified by Top and Bottom.

Slope Angle Range (Rango de Inclinación)

Limits the creation of trees over a range of slope terrain. 0 degrees is equal to a horizontal surface, and 90 degrees is a totally vertical surface.

Note: The plugin first calculates all trees over the area and following, it discards which all not inside the altitude and slope range. So, the time to build the trees may be almost equal when altitude/slope ranges are defined or when all trees are built. It's importante to limit before very well the build zone with the area splines and distribution map.