Stopping trees at the waters edge!

[Jonathan]

Hi All,

Just purchased TG2 Deep Edition - used Classic a long time ago. I am putting a population of objects next to the edge of a lake, and cannot remember how to stop the population edging it's annoying way into the water - I seem to remember having to assign a shader, but my feeble mind has forgotten! Could someone put me out of my misery and remind me how to, in effect, clip the population to stop it going into the water?

Many thanks!

Jonathan

[Tangled-Universe]

Inside the populator you see an option "use density shader" and a button with a + symbol in it next to it. Click on it and choose "create new shader -> colour shader -> distribution shader V4".
The distribution shader V4 is by default white and thus all trees will remain at the same position since the mask (mask = distribution shader = densityshader) is whtie everywhere.

Since you want to have the population to "stop" at the edge of the water you need to define a minimum altitude.
Go to the distribution shader by clicking again on that "+ button" and in the 2nd tab called "altitude restriction" you can set restrictions for altitude.
Check the altitude setting of your water object and take that value as minimum altitude value and don't forget to enable the restriction.
If you're water object is @ 100m altitude (default) then you need to keep an eye on the "altitude fuzzy zone" of default 200m which would still allow trees to go in the water since the gradient will be from 0 to 200 metres.

For instance, set fuzzy zone to 20m and your minumum altitude to 110m and you'll end up with trees above the waterline and some pretty near it (gradient from 100 to 120 metres).
If they're still to close increase minimum altitude accordingly.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Martin

[Jonathan]

Thanks Martin - very much appreciated!

Jonathan