Plant Placement onto a Fill

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

Ci Sites Plant objects, or any other object, can be placed to fill in an area - to get started, draw the fill (or fills) that you want to cover with plants

Then select the fill (or fills), and click on the Ci Tools menu, then Sites, and then Place Plants within Selected Fills 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 Grid section allows you to define how the placement will be staggered inside the fill. the alpha value sets the angle that the grid will run across, and the D value sets the spacing between grid points - i.e. the size of the "rows and columns" that will make up the placement grid
2. The next setting allows you to Randomly Adjust the Position that Plants will be placed in the fill, on the grid specified above. If the Shift is set to 0, plants will be placed directly on the gridline intersections, otherwise whatever value you set here, each plant will be placed at a random distance below this number away from the lines
   
   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)
3. 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
4. Finally, the dialog shows how many fills 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: