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Level Design Snapping Objects to Terrain Problem (Trying to Make a Forest)

Scan_carry

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Feb 21, 2017
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Hi all, I'm just looking for some advice on making my first map.I'm slowly following along with a combination of YouTube tutorials and forum/wiki guides trying to get the basics down before I get ambitious. So far I've put down a terrain, altered its height a bit to make a hill and a ditch, and added an AT gun to practice placing a static mesh. Pretty basic. As a second bit of practice placing meshes and copying and moving them i tried making a small forested area. This is where I ran into the issue I'm having. For the AT gun I was able to raise it up in the air a bit and then hit END to make it snap to the terrain below it. But with the trees I've found that when i select all of them (or even select them individually) and hit END nothing happens. I've worked out from tinkering that this is probably because they're relatively close together. I'm assuming that when i hit END the static meshes of the trees are already slightly touching and so they stay where they are rather than moving down to the mesh (not sure on terminology, assume "mesh" still applies) of the ground level. Is there any work around to this or is there simply a limit to how dense of a forest/vegetation area you can make without having to manually move every tree to ground level? Thanks for any advice you can give.
 
If I understand correctly you're saying that you can't automatically get static meshes to snap to the terrain. As far as I can tell from the tutorials I've watch you can certainly do this by hitting END. I've tried it myself with one tree and it works fine. My issue is with trying to get multiple trees to do it. Sorry if I've misunderstood you.
 
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It depends on the point of origin for the model. It snaps to that, which means it's not always the ideal center of the object. Meshes and all actors snap to the grid (if enabled). It makes everything nice and neat. Because sections of terrain are independent of the grid, it means you won't get a perfect match.
 
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Completely missed that part of swag's post! I'll give that a try tomorrow and hopefully it'll sort everything out. Also sorry nymets, didn't read your username before I replied. Your youtube tutorials have been really useful by the way. I've not had much time to make progress this week but they've made everything seem much more manageable.
 
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NorthDumpling;n2287338 said:
But why dont you want to place every tree manually? When I do my forests, I try to place every one individually , scaling and rotating every single tree, makes it look more natural.

You can also use the mesh tool, it's much easier. I do that, then go through them all quickly to fine tune them a bit.
 
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To be honest this is the first attempt I've made at any kind of map design so I was just having a mess around seeing what I was able to do and quickly laying down large areas of tree seemed like a fairly efficient skill to learn. Especially for tree lines outside of the player area which don't need to be as detailed. Is that what you mean by decolayers? I've been wondering how you make the area around your map look presentable without it affecting performance. Also is the mesh tool method of laying down trees what I described (copy and pasting them) or another method? Sorry if I'm being a bit slow but I'm not familiar with UE3 (or any other SDK) terminology.
 
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Beskar Mando;n2287410 said:
You can also use the mesh tool, it's much easier. I do that, then go through them all quickly to fine tune them a bit.

Just pointing out, that if the XYZ moving tool is active while placing meshes with the mesh tool, it may create a duplicate on top of the mesh you placed when you place a new one.
They are not directly on top of each other but very close so it wont show up on the map error check window.
There are quite numerous meshes on top of each other in RS 2 maps, bushes and grass sets mainly.
 
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