Trees at weird angles?

[N-drju]

Hello to all. I'm new to Terragen 2 and despite the fact there are no stupid questions, I probably have a really dumb one. The software is really nice, I like it a lot, but...

I recently started to experiment a bit with adding objects to the scene, onto the surface of the planet (tgo and obj files). I was greatly surprised when I tried to add some trees near the planet's "equator". All trees were not growing up into the sky as I have anticipated, but were facing "north pole" so to say (i.e.: almost laying down on the surface). As if the planet was not a planet at all but a hill slope!

What should I do to put trees and other objects straight up, regardless of their position on the planet's surface? As far as I know plants should not lay down on their side once they are at the equator...

I do realize that the solution here might be much simpler than I think, but I just can't get it done. I'm really tired of it right now. Hope you professionals will help me solve this problem!

[Tangled-Universe]

Well as far as I know there's actually no solution to this.
The coordinate system TG uses works best around it's 'origin' (coordinates 0,0,0).
You can deviate miles/kilometres from it, but the further away you move from the origin the trickier the coordinate system starts to behave.
Without going into a lot of technical stuff I'd just like to point out that at the moment there isn't a solution which will allow you to have your trees stand up correctly all over the place.
Also, it's an issue known by the developers.

[Oshyan]

Fortunately there is a solution as of TG 2.4, which is the Population Lean To Normal function. The population bounding box will still look weird (it will be distorted), and the area calculations may be off, but the plants will at least be oriented to the planet surface. You can start by setting the Lean to 1 and the limits both to 0, then adjust from there if it's too severe with your particular terrain.

- Oshyan

[N-drju]

A correction - I DO have version 2.4 as a matter of fact. So you say Oshyan that lean to normal should definitely solve this issue?

One more thing which is somehow connected to that topic - camera controls. Once the camera is away from origin it's like really hard to operate it and the navigation controls don't seem to work right. The controls seem to be aligned as well to just one axis, regardless of the camera's position.

How can I "align" a camera to the surface of the planet while moving? Is it possible to do something so that it remains at a fixed altitude all the time instead of "escaping" into space?

[Oshyan]

There is no "fixed altitude" function, but you can set Look At and Camera Orbit points, as well as switch between Free Orbit and non-free mode. The 3 icons on the right of the bottom 3D preview toolbar (beginning with the eye) control these functions, hover over them for tooltips.

- Oshyan

[N-drju]

Ok. Thanks for these directions! Now I know for sure.