Is there an easy way to manual clear spawns from an area?

[rgresko]

New to Gaia and wondering if there is a way to easily stop spawns from happening in a small area of the terrain, for cleaning up things that are spawning over some hand-placed objects. Right now I'm using a bunch of little Gena splines with removal extensions to do this, but I'm sure that's not the best way. Thanks-

[Bryan]

You can set the Gaia Spawner to remove and then disable all the spawner masks and set a distance mask. 
You would need to do this for any resource prototypes, you want to remove. 

 

[Bryan]

Just make sure the objects that you want to remove are in the spawner otherwise it wont know what to remove. 

 

[rgresko]

Thanks! I have a lot of hand-placed prefabs that aren't generated by spawners, that's my use case for the question. Everything I place with spawners is working and I understand how to add the extensions to those if needed.

It's the non-spawner created items that are my problem. Is this what people use masks for?

 

[Bryan]

Masks are a great way to control the spawning. 
Height masks - controls the height at which things spawn. 
Distance mask- controls the area at which things are spawned. 
Noise mask- adds noise mask. 
etc. 

I recommend turning on the visualization (eye ball looking icon next to the color) and you can see these changes in realtime before you spawn. 
 

[designleviathan]

@rgresko I'm pretty sure I know what your looking for - focus on using / stacking masks like @Bryan said.

Specifically (if my spidey sense is right) you will want to hone in on the use of collision masks.

Iimho - I find the tag ones work best atm for me personally but YMMV.

Make sure your bespoke / 'hand placed' prefab placements are all properly set tag-wise and then you should be able to 'carve' out room around those objects using that mask in your spawner.

This is how I handle non-gaia / gena placed objects and it works well notwithstanding other issues.

[Bryan]

On 4/23/2022 at 5:02 PM, rgresko said:

It's the non-spawner created items that are my problem. Is this what people use masks for?

 

Correct as stated above. 

Along with what I said an important process is tagging the appropriate prefabs as well. 
You can do this at the prefab level so you dont have to manually tag each and every one after you place the object down. 
The visualization still is a great way to see if its working properly. 

Hope this helps!