Quick little fix for Vector Placement

Ideas
,
1

Hello everyone.

The “Vector Placement” tool is a simple yet powerful tool we’ve been given a few updates ago in a preview form.
This tho, still have some rough edges that would take little to fix. The biggest one is the misplacement of objects onto non-flat (0° roll / pitch) surfaces.

Here’s a quick example of what I’m saying:
image

I spent time modeling this guardrail, making it modular for roads, and then after using it with Vector Placement, we realize that…it’s wasted work. All parts should be placed one-by-one by hand to achieve a decent result, because if the terrain isn’t flattened, models keep a 0° pitch and create steps to follow the terrain.

My suggestion is to add either one or both of these 2 simple settings in the tool properties:

    • add Pitch and Roll numeric input other than rotation (yaw) to manually input a value, then we can just make more vectors to compensate
    • more effectively a “Snap to Normal” option that will work like the one for Scenery Objects, making the placement follow the curve of the terrain, with an option to lock/unlock one of the two axes, so we can decide whether to keep a default roll and free the pitch or vice versa.

This would be a game changer in non-flat airports, mountain areas and scenery / airport development in general.

Hope this doesn’t end up in nothing, because that’s something which would really make a difference :wink:

Regards

Chris - LN Design

2

Yes. Snap to normal would be super helpful!

1 Like
3

Also, some more control over singularly placed objects (more or less like you do on Taxiways, maybe defining a min/max stretch of the mesh etc) would be awesome. Just to clarify, being able to act on single segments would be much helpful in a lot of difficult situations, and being Vector Placement mostly used on a large scale (main purpose has always been airport fencing), it’s hard to be spot-on just by eyeballing and manually place dozens of different vectors.

Having more control on just one vector, would improve our ability to optimize and make eye-pleasing airports and sceneries

4

At the moment, VectorPlacement shouldnt be used as the LOD system wont unload any vector placement object out of memory.

This is causing serious performance issues with scenery and compounds with model complexity.
It does eventually unload at around 30kms.

There is a bug logged for this but no offciail update on weather it will make SU13 or not.

5

Might be worth to ask @FlyingRaccoon if there’s any update on whether that bug is in the backlog or we could expect a fix soon, and the fixing it might be a good occasion to put some additional code to make it worth the duty it has to attend :wink:

1 Like