This layer allows you to clone selected meshes onto a lofted layer. This layer is great for doing things like crash barriers, it can pick the mesh to use as the main cloned mesh as well as a start and end mesh, so you can have a neat start and end to the generated mesh. You can also set a gap value of each object.

Clone General Params

The general params for the simple clone layer, these control the path to use, the start and length of the layer as well as options to scale, rotate and offset the layer.

Name

Name of the layer.

Enabled

Un checking this will remove this layer from the loft object and hide most of the inspector for it.

Col

Color to tint the inspector for this layer, makes finding the layer you want easier on complex loft objects.

Lock

Sometimes you will want to have the loft object update in realtime but maybe not all the layers actually change, if you check the Lock option then during a rebuild the layer will not recalculate its contribution to the mesh but will just use the last lot of vertices it built so greatly speeding up the mesh creation for entire object. So useful if you have a complex race track loft object and just want to deform a crash barrier layer from it, so you would lock all the layers except for the one to change, update that then lock it again.

Material

The material to use to render the faces built by this layer.

Surface

The Mega Loft Object this layer will build onto.

Layer

When you select a Loft object as the surface this drop down will be filled with the layers from that object that you can use as the surface for the clone layer to build on.

Start

The start position along the path shape to start building the layer, 0 is the start 1 is the end, values outside this range will either loop for closed shapes or extrapolate past the ends on open shapes.

Length

The length of the loft along the path, 1 is a full length of the path loft, the length value is added to the start value to find the actual end value, so if this is outside the rang 0 to 1 then the layer will either loop or extrapolate past the ends of the path.

Cross Alpha

The position across the surface where the clone layer will be built.

Calc Up

If this is set then the mesh will be built perpendicular to the mesh underneath it.

Remove DOF

If calc up is off then this value will appear and will control how upright the mesh is on slopes.

Rotate

Use these to rotate the resulting clone layer.

TMRotate

This rotation will be applied to the objects to be cloned before being used to build the layer so this can be used to adjust objects that are in the wrong orientation or whose up axis is wrong etc.

Tangent

This value controls how far the system will look ahead when computing directions or tangents for such things as slopes and directions.

Axis

The axis to use as the width of the clone objects when computing sizes and spacing.

Use Twist

Check this option to allow the use of a twist curve along the length of the layer.

Twist

How much to multiply the twist curve by to get the final twist amount to apply to the clone layer.

Twist Crv

The curve to use to define the twisting along the length of the layer.

Scale

Global scaling value for the entire layer, this allows you to easily adjust the size of the entire layer.

Use Cross Crv

Sometimes you want the clone layer to wander across the surface and not just be in one place, so you can turn on the option to control the position across the surface from a curve.

Cross Crv

The curve that controls the position across the surface.

Object Params

This is where you can pick the start, main and end meshes to be used in the construction of the clone layer. Each one can be enabled and have its own scale values etc. The params listed below are the same for all three objects used in the cloning.

Enabled

Each of the meshes used in the clone mesh construction can be enabled or disabled using this.

Mesh

The mesh to use for either the start, main or end mesh in the clone layer.

Offset

Each component of the clone can have its own offset for fine tuning the look of the final mesh.

Scale

Each component can also have its own scaling.

Gap

Says how much of a gap to leave between either the start and end objects or to control the regular spacing of the main clone mesh.

Clone Layer Video

A little video guide to the simple clone layer and what some of the params do.

MegaShapes Tutorial 3: Clone Layer

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