The new Area tool shows some great promise especially with it’s ability to continue working when you refresh a Ground surface with new geometry, this is still a problem with painted vegetation etc., I have noticed it’s possible to copy these areas around and highlight multiple and control the contents which is great for the types of wide area (20km) projects (Roading/Transportation) that I generally do.
Things that might be helpful in the future editions of the tool would be the ability to import polygon areas to represent these areas so that the drawing of the areas can be done externally and imported, meaning that you could use GIS tools/CAD or other methods of importing/categorizing areas.
Something else that would be helpful is having the areas only apply to certain surfaces ie… think of a chessboard where you only want the content to show on the black squares not the white, could some form of hierarchy control provide this functionality by making the area a sub category of a surface therefore it doesn’t see any other surfaces. This would be very helpful as we usually import landscape areas that are one combined mesh instead of multiple meshes but the combined mesh is small areas spread along the corridor for example a 17km road we did recently, with the ability to define a single area to cover them all with specific planting and for them to self clip on only those surfaces would be amazing, the standard scatter tool has not worked well for this in the past when you have such large surfaces you are lucky to see anything at all when it’s spreading so few items over such a large/spread out surface.
Please add more features and improvements that anyone reading this would also like to see, I’ve only played with it a little so far and have yet to find more to comment on but it’s going to be a very helpful tool.
I should also quickly mention the same import ability for strings/lines would be helpful for the Spacing tool as well.
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