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Align objects to face downhill with Forest Effects
How to use a really handy effect that allows you to automatically rotate objects so that they face downhill.
Technologies:
Forest Pack

Requirements

Forest Pack Pro

  • Forest Pack Logo, The Scatteting tool for 3ds Max

Welcome to our latest tutorial exploring Forest Pack’s built-in Effects. This time, we’ll explain a really handy option that allows you to automatically rotate objects scattered with Forest Pack so that they face down the slope of a surface.

It's very simple to use. To add the Face Downhill Forest Effect,  go to the Effects rollout and click + to add a new effect. Click the wand icon to open the Effects browser and then select and load the Face Downhill effect from the Transform folder

That’s it! The effect uses the surface normal of the polygon under the scattered item to determine the direction of the downward slope and aligns the object accordingly. If you do want a bit of randomisation on top of that, you can use the AngleMin and AngleMax parameters. 

As you can see, it takes just a few seconds to add this effect in Forest Pack, but it could save a lot of time manually rotating individual objects. Remember, this is just one of the many effects included in Forest Pack and we’ll continue to release more tutorials covering others, so stay tuned and please feel free to let us know in the forum if there’s a new effect you’d like to see added!