MegaShapes Scatter Spline

This layer is almost identical to the other Scatter layers except this will scatter the selected mesh with the selected material along a spline instead of over a surface.

Scatter Spline Params


The params that control the scattering of the selected object along a spline, such as how many objects to scatter, where to scatter and any random values to add in.

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.

Scatter Mesh

The mesh that is to be scattered on this layer.

Material

The material to use to render the layer.

Path

The path along which to loft the cross section shape.

Curve


If the selected path contains more than one curve a slider will appear allowing you to select which curve to use.

Snap


Sometimes the curves in a shape are not aligned nicely, so you can check this to automatically snap all the curves in shape so that the first knot of each curve is in the same position before being used in the layer.

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.

Path Move

This allows you to adjust the positioning of the path.

Path Rotate

You can also rotate the path.

Path Scale

And scale it.

Count

How many of the object to scatter in the layer.

Seed

Random seed value, change this to later the distribution of the objects.

Offset

Changing this will move the objects relative to the surface.

Rotate

Apply a rotation to the scatter object before it is applied.

Scale

Scale the scatter object before it is used in the layer.

Rnd Rot

Set the range of any random rotation to be added to the object before it is added into the layer, the system will use the range of +- the values in here.

Rnd Scale Min

Set the low range of any random scaling to be applied to each object in the scatter.

Rnd Scale Max

Set the high range of any random scaling to be applied to each object in the scatter.

Tangent

The amount to look ahead when calculating slopes and directions.

Axis

Changes the axis to use as the major axis. Currently has no effect in the scatter layers.

Scale

A global scaling value, this makes changing the size of everything on the layer very simple.

Alpha

Alpha is the current offset from the start position for the layer, this is used by the animation system to easily move the entire contents along the surface.

Speed

When in play mode this is the amount added per second to the alpha value above to animate the layer.

Use Density

You can select to have the distribution density of the objects controlled by a curve, check this to enable.

Density

The curve to use to define where the objects are scattered, areas where the curve value is near zero will have less objects in than areas on the curve where the value is near 1.

Scatter Layer Video

A little video guide to the scatter layer and what some of the params do. The video is off the Scatter to surface layer but the options are almost the same.

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