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ArmA 3 Terrain Builder, ArmA 3 Terrain Builder Support Forum

In Terrain Builder it is essential to add random scale and yaw (YAW is ROTATION) to your Vegetation Objects, if you fail to do that then you need to re-think why you are developing crap looking terrains because that is what you're doing. Pitch and Roll are special attributes in that sense that for example Terrain Processor does not have randomization for these values.

You can set random pitch, roll, yaw and scale to objects from template properties → template → template randomization.

Usually this is only done for vegetation objects like Rocks, Bushes and Trees because man made objects like houses would not look nice if terrain builder randomizes their “alignment”, also randomizing scale for buildings with fancy geometries like fire, view and regular geometry LOD will cause bad things to happen (at least if you use too much scaling), also if you scale building down, to make it miniature size, number one you cannot walk into enter-able building through a door way anymore, not to mention such building would look silly as heck.

Yaw is the one most people want to use, its object rotation (yaw == rotation). Most people? heh yeah meaning that rotation is much easier attribute to use than scale for example, rotation is just a number between 0 and 360 (or 359.999 however precise you want to be) while scale is much more complex random value between minimum and maximum, you can easily screw up scale while there is really nothing to screw up with rotation.

Pitch is to “tilt” the object forwards and backwards.

Roll is to “tilt” the object left and right.

Scale is what gives size to the object. Remember; it is absolutely essential to give good random scale for vegetation objects, unless you want to make those famous “clone army of trees” crap looking forests. Please note that in some highly maintained, trimmed whatever its called, artistic house yards or mansion driveways or even city streets its sometimes preferable to have MOSTLY the same size trees planted. Of course this goes into fancy terrain design then, if you're doing big forests then random scale is a must.

Back in the good old OFP WrpTool days I recommended in WrpTool manual to use 0.75 to 125 object scale, guess that is like 75% to 125%, anything larger or smaller might start to cause geometry issues even with vegetation objects and just simply make the object look silly miniature or huge unrealistic monster size. This is just a recommendation, you use what you think is most realistic and geometry wise works best, if you find smaller/larger values still working and have examples to show, please post a topic to ArmA 3 Forum to share the knowledge.

BTW if you get really beautiful results using Pitch and Roll, please post the values you used into PMC Tactical Forum, I'd love to hear your experiences on that as too large/strong pitch/roll values can make forests look “crooked”, looks very unrealistic if every tree points too much into a different angle.

Remember: always add random scale and rotation (yaw) to vegetation objects, Always.