This tutorial will guide you through the basics of filling up spaces using the Rectangular Filler policy.
This policy is part of the group of Expanding Policies and is used to fill in large areas with objects, textures, parcel links, or any other object.
Using a Rectangular Filler Policy is one way to replace manual object placement. The examples below show how this policy might be used in different design situations in Parcel Editor.
You will find each referenced activity template in the City Project parcels folder (see City Project Folder). Follow the instructions in Loading the City Project to bring up the city project in Ürban PAD.
When you have loaded the Ocean Isle city project from Ürban PAD, click the Parcel Editor tab.
Next, open beach.gcf. This activity template contains three different areas where spaces have been filled using the Rectangular Filler Policy. If you look in the layers window, you will see that they correspond to sub-parcels that have been created from the original parcels.
Start by clicking the first sub-parcel in the layers window. You will see that the top left parcel is highlighted. Below the sub-parcel line are two items:
These items refer to the objects with which the sub-parcel space is being filled. In this case, they are parcel links, or other activity templates which are created with Parcel Editor.
Click on this top sub-parcel to access the Edit view. If you click on the Expanding Policies tab, you will see that this parcel has two Expanding Policies. Both are Rectangular Filler, and each one has a child index.
The child index corresponds to the position in the layers window of the item which will fill the area. In this case, 1 refers to parcel_link_parasol, and 2 refers to parcel_link_people.
It may be simpler to think of the area to be filled as the parent area, and the filling element as the child. The child can always be selected from the sub-elements attached to the parent parcel.
In this case, the area will be filled with both parasols and people.
You will also notice that the Only Complete option is checked in the Rectangular Filler Policy. The only complete option refers to whether or not you want extra filling objects to be placed when after initial filling, the remaining space is not enough wide enough to accomodate a full filling object. In such cases, according to its masking policy, the filling object might be cuttable or not.
For instance, if you want a texture to completely fill the space, unclick only complete. Please see Expanding Policies for more information on this point.
This sub-parcel filler contains two objects: parcel_link_parasol and parcel_link_people. It is therefore likely that these two objects will collide with each other as they try to fill the same space.
To avoid a collision, it is necessary to use colliding policies. Here, a variable colliding policy has been used to regulate object interactions.
You will see in the Edit window for both parcel_link_parasol and parcel_link_people that each has a numerical value:
The higher numerical value will “win” in any collision between two objects. If a parasol and a person compete for the same space, the parasol will win.
You will notice that palm trees also take up two sub-parcel areas. They also function as rectangular filler elements, but are slightly different to parasols and people in that existence policies and positioning policies have been used to vary their appearance.
Using an existence policy breaks the uniformity of the area by specifying that a filler element is present only a certain percentage of the time. A positioning policy creates visual variety by changing the orientation of the object at each instance of its placement.