Drop tool

[Anonymous]

A tool to drop things on each other!
Trees or houses on a mesh for example.
That is SO frustrating to be obliged to place hundreds of houses again when a mesh has been modified.
Since you, GS, doesn't seem to want to provide som scripting tools you MUST give us this kind of tools as a standard!
Or a way to link things with each other.

[Laszlo Nagy]

The Gravity and Surface Snap features help in placing elements on the surface of other elements.
However, the associativity (or constraint) would be nice so if, e.g. a terrain is modified all placed trees and stuff adjust vertically to the new top surface of the terrain.

[Paul King]

laszlonagy wrote:
The Gravity and Surface Snap features help in placing elements on the surface of other elements.
However, the associativity (or constraint) would be nice so if, e.g. a terrain is modified all placed trees and stuff adjust vertically to the new top surface of the terrain.

Also an ability to literally drop from any height would be a time saver - or retroactively apply gravity to groups of already placed objects, (to eliminate the 'floaters') that always crop up when populating complex scenes with a large variety of objects, each with own parametric conventions as to placement origin (some you place according to top height, some base height etc)

Falling objects striking an inclined surface could have the option to rotate normal to surface, or remain vertical but embed object base into surface, sufficiently to prevent any visibly floating underside from being exposed.


An ability to drop in any direction also useful - e.g. light fittings could 'fall' up until they hit ceiling. Wall fixtures placed in 3D could fall sideways to perfectly meet walls etc. Again retroactive gravity applied to selected groups of objects would help for when eg ceiling changes height, becomes inclined, or becomes a bulbous undulating morph etc.


Permanent associativity would also be very good - though if this triggers too many performance issues , at least with retroactive gravity, changes in geometry of populated surfaces could be quickly corrected for with populating objects that need to follow - as one off process rather than a permanent CPU overhead.

Would probably need some sort of user adjustable maximum falling range - so objects dropped where there is a gap in populated surface don't keep falling forever, or end up several stories below (or above) the intended surface

[DGSketcher]

+1 for the "retroactive" gravity option. I hate finding fittings that are floating 100mm above the floor because that is the default for some UK template objects.

[alemanda]

laszlonagy wrote:
The Gravity and Surface Snap features help in placing elements on the surface of other elements.
However, the associativity (or constraint) would be nice so if, e.g. a terrain is modified all placed trees and stuff adjust vertically to the new top surface of the terrain.

+1

[jat]

+1, any function like this yet?