Drop Curve to Surface Failure

Bug Reports
#1

I am at the point of wanting to place some roads onto my terrain and followed the advice on using ‘drop curve to surface’ to get them to follow the curve of the land. It seems simple enough, the only problem is that it doesn’t work in either RC3 or the shiny new release candidate.

I tried a few things e.g. deleting my lines and starting again, deleting the device, nothing worked.

I checked the test5 map and that worked fine. I think the problem is that I am using File Input devices to load my base map before sculpting it in WM. I can drop the curves fine if I just feed it from a Perlin generator, but if it’s from a file input or a chain from there it simply fails.

On the plus side, loving the new toys!

#2

So, I believe what’s happening here is probably a behavior that is not well documented:

Drop to Surface should really be relabeled as “Drop to Currently Selected Surface”.

If you have a different device selected, it will try to drop to that device’s surface. If you have a non-heightfield output selected, the drop will fail. (This will happen if you are for example viewing the combined output at the overlay view).

This behavior was intended as the flexibility is very useful, but it needs to be better documented – and it should also reach into the combined data and still be able to use the heightfield of an overlay’d device.

Let me know if the above doesn’t account for what you’re seeing!

#3

I spotted that little gem when I read your post a while back about how to lay out roads, so the first thing I did was try it on a part of the machine earlier in the chain. The result was still the same, all heights set to 4096, which is my max height. I’ve also tried it on the Layout Generator that holds the road curves with no success.

Worth noting however, is the devices leading up to my layout generator are typically combiners and bias/gain. These take mixed inputs and give mixed outputs which may be a factor. I have tried feeding another layout generator in as the selected device at the time of dropping, and that works. The adv. perlin noise works as a target but bias/gain and combiner do not. Channelled erosion and inverter also failed, but voronoi worked.

Should be pretty easy to spot given those conditions.

#4