can I get rid of the grid in my foliage paint? [Solved]

poopipe

This looks stupid - and you can see if from ground level

Short of selecting and manually moving trees do I have any options here?  it's not connected to landscape tile boundaries  - just looks like they're using a grid based distribution and neglected to deal with the edges of each cell

poopipe

oh ok - solved it

for what I'm sure is a "very good" reason this is caused by enabling the Collision with World option in the placement settings. 

Alex_J

if you are using the procedural foliage spawners and interested in a faster workflow that doesn't require waiting for the spawners to think, it is possible to limit foliage placement per type using texture mask. You can create those in terrain gen software like world machine, world creator, etc (assuming you are using one). Then foliage instances can just be painted  with huge brush, but they only go where the mask allows. Since terrain gen softwares can usually spit out mask in just a couple seconds I found this to be preferable to using the procedural foliage spawners.

Hand painting for a large world sounds tedious but with large brush it only takes a few swipes and is much faster than tweaking and than respawning the procedural foliage spawners.

i cant remember exactly where the mask gets read but if you are interested I can open project where I was doing that and take a look.

poopipe

You can mask both painted and volume foliage by landscape layer - it's a property of the foliage type . 

This is all painted - I'm doing that for the main forests because procedural spawners don't give me enough control to carve specific paths through the trees etc. and like you say, covering large areas is quick. 
I'll probably use foliage spawners for distributing undergrowth and sparser stuff like bushes in meadows as placement is less important - finding the balance is a little tricky but it'll work itself out as I go. 

Alex_J

yeah i meant using some additional mask besides the landscape layers. But making some empty landscape layers just for foliage masking I think is also something that people do.