Object Spawner Questions

[skantron]

Hi, I am getting started with Gaia and Gena, and I am learning the ins and outs of the object spawners currently.  Im still trying to figure out what the best way to organize my assets and spawners to work like I would like to, and what is going to work without fighting how Gaia wants to work.  I want to set up a spawner that scatters three different objects (Lets say it's 3 different rocks).  So, I wanted to set up one spawner, with one spawn rule, containing the three instances in the resources.  I was hoping this would create a single instance in each 'fit' location, but instead it creates an overlapping copy of each instance in each location.  Is there a way to make Gaia generate a single instances at each fit location, but chose which one is spawned randomly (ideally with control of what % distribution each instance has)?  The other option would be to create a seperate spawn rule per object but that seems like it would get incredibly tedious and error prone as soon as the biome starts to get even a little complex.

Thanks in advance!  Still trying to wrap my head around Gaia and it's work flow and how to best utilize it on our project...

[Bryan]

On 2/23/2022 at 3:04 PM, skantron said:

I am getting started with Gaia and Gena,

I actually think that you would have an easier time with GeNa Pro. 
You could achieve this by creating a spawner and placing the assets you wanted. 



Set the type to random - as it will spawn one of the spawn prototypes. 



In the spawn criteria you can check the collisions so it doesnt collide with objects when you spawn: 


This seems like the simplest way to achieve what you are after. 
Let me know if I can provide more assistance! 
 

[skantron]

Hi, thank you for the reply, We are using GeNa as well for hand placement, but we also want to use Gaia for filling in large forest areas, and there is specifically where we want to have a tree spawner that can spawn like 3-6 tree variations that don't overlap.  Is that not possible?

[Peter]

@skantron You can set up a tree spawner that spawns variations in the same area, but you currently need to set up a spawn rule each per tree that you want to spawn. You can avoid overlapping by assigning a collision mask that avoids trees created by the previous spawn rules. Note that you can duplicate spawn rules with the "+" button on the spawn rule so you do not need to re-enter all the settings for the spawn rule again and you can just swap out the prefab for the game object / tree after.

The workflow you suggested (setting up "variants with a chance slider") we plan to add soon. Having one spawn rule per spawned object / tree gives you the advantage that you can apply individual settings for scaling, rotate to slope, etc. but in practice I find as well that very often you just want to spawn variations of the "same thing" in a common area.