This is a Lightwave layout plugin to move the selected objects along the world Y axis to the ground surface mesh you choose. I use it whenever the ground surface in my model is irregular like the real world and I have lots of trees or cars to position. It also can be used to set the y values of a camera or other object to skim over the irregular surface at a set offset distance.
Original Features
Features added to Version 1.4
New Version 1.6
Usage
Notes: The ground surface to place the objects on must be triangulated.
Groups of objects can be organized into a hierarchy. Since nulls even
if selected wont be moved (by default), use them to organize your
parking lot or landscape planting. Grounding a full hierarchy of
objects (both parents and child object)s together with the Add random
heading option or the Rotate Pitch and bank option is unpredictable
because the parent would be rotated which would move the child.
Pre-select
your cars, trees, or whatever. Run Ground Those Objects. The list box
lets you choose your triangulated ground surface from all objects.
After running Ground Those Objects, each of the selected objects will
have been moved to have its Y value resting on the ground surface. Of
course if your object isn't over the ground it won't be moved
The random heading option does just that and makes identical trees look a little different from each other.
The rotate pitch and bank option adjusts pivot rotation to get the four wheels of a car to match the slope of the ground triangle it is over.
The include hierarchy below selected items option is for when you have more than a couple of hundred objects to select. Lightwave doesn't handle extreemly large selections very quickly. This gets the items selected without Lightwave needing to highlight all their handles with openGL.
If you put a 10 in the start frame and a 40 in the end frame options, you will get 30 key frames set for each object.