Plant placement along Lines

The Sites tool includes the ability to quickly and easily place plants along a line or to fill an area - this page covers placing along a line - see here to place in a Fill

Ci Sites Plant objects, or any other object, can be placed along a Spline, Line, or Polyline. To start, draw the line you would like to place your Plants (or other objects) on.

Next, select the line you have drawn, click on the Ci Tools menu, then Sites, and then Place Plants along a Selected Line or Arc as shown below

The object picker will then open, where you can choose the Plant (or object) that you want to place on the line. The Ci Tools Sites plants are located in the Ci Tools Library folder, then Sites, and Plants Cutout

Choose the Plant or object you want, and change any settings as required, and then hit OK. Once you do, a dialog to specify how you want the placement to be done will open:

1. The Spacing Type setting defines whether you want the spacing between Plants to be measured along the selected line, or directly from Plant to Plant. Then the Value below allows you to set the spacing distance, and then the drop-down allows you to choose if the value you give is the minimum spacing (At Least), maximum spacing (No more than), or Exactly.
2. The Polylines setting allows you to choose if the spacing should be calculated over the entire length of the selected line, or if it should be set independently on each line segment (only applies when placing on a Polyline)
3. The next setting allows you to Randomly Adjust the Position that Plants will be placed on the line. If this is set to 0, plants will be placed directly on the line, otherwise whatever value you set here, each plant will be placed at a random distance below this number away from the line
   
   You can also set a random Rotation here as well, although this setting will not be available when using Ci Tools plants. If you do use it for other objects though (i.e. set it to anything besides 0), it will randomly rotate the objects within X degrees of the default rotation angle (where X is the value you set here)
4. The next settings allow you to Randomly Adjust the Size of placed objects, although similar to the rotation, this is not available for Sites Plants, as those settings are defined in the objects themselves (see details here).
   
   To use this, just set the percentage change you would like the randomisation to apply to the Width Depth and Height of the objects. Setting these to 0 will use no randomisation.
   
   The Randomise All Settings option allows you to - on supported objects - randomise all settings to do with sizing, age, branch placement etc. Note this only works on a few of the 3D Trees which are in Ci Tools Library - Sites - Plants 3D. Specifically, the Ghost Gum and Lombardy Poplar
5. Finally, the dialog shows how many lines and meshes are currently selected - i.e. to let you know what it is going to run the operation on.

Once you have set things here the way that you want, hit OK, and the tool will do the placement of your plants.

Elevating the Placed Plants to a Mesh Surface

As part of the process of placing the plants on a line, you can also have the tool elevate (or drop) the placed elements onto the surface of a Mesh.

To do so, just select the Mesh that you want them to elevate to along with the lines before you begin the operation:

Results in something like this: