place objects (instances) on vertices / points of a meshe.

Unity Engine
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Hi people,

Used to work on quite large urban scenes within Lightwave, with hundred objects that are placed on point clouds : trees, urban furniture, etc.
And I wonder if it’s possible to do the same thing in Unity.
Say use either a “meshe” actually only made of points (no faces no edges) or a standard meshe, but in any cases manage to place automatically (via some script ?) clones of some object on all points / vertex.

Unity terrain engine may be great for games and “natural” tree placing but in no case usable for urban scenes while trees and objects can not be placed randomly…
On the other hand replacing them one by one in the scene is unaffordable when you got hundreds or even thousands of them, coupled to the fact most of terrains are not horizontal…

By the way, I know I could use vertex snap feature now but it would still be very long to do… and guess the pain when updates are made on the placement meshe…
Of course snaping new function is better than nothing but really only little help.

help much appreciated, thanx by advance.

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up ?

3
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You can certainly instantiate an object at a specified point, and you can certainly automate that process as well (either in-game or via editor scripting). I don’t fully understand the requirements beyond that though, so I can’t really comment further.

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@Jesse Anders : well the first part of your answer shows you understood quite well.
Need is to have a meshe and to automaticaly clone instances of trees (or whatever objects) on each vertice of this meshe.
In absolute the best would be to have also an option for random scale / rotate instances, of course.

@cerebrate : thank you very much for this source. Seems to approach what I’m looking for though I guess it’s gonna take much time for me to understand it. Rather than asking you more and more explanations about it, just : do you know if there is any example of using this somewhere ? Not asking for full script or whatever but just seeing it working would help me much.