Presagis

is there a hidden tool or has someone written a script that will project vertices either on to the trackplane or onto a polygon?

The behavior of project polygons, unfortunately, changes the order of the polys, and I am running a differential on vertices “Before and After” modification to extract differences, so any reordering is BAD.  Seems like it should be fairly easy to do, or to modify the project poly tool so that when you leave it in its original parent, it stays in its original place.

or a script that would resort the polys by ID value in ascending order would work, if there is one out there.  I suppose that would be the easiest for me to write if I have to.

At the risk of suggesting the obvious (or more likely misunderstanding the question)... have you tried the good ol’ Project tool in Creator? It projects vertices onto the current trackplane (which can be set from an arbitrary face) so you should get what you are asking about

I went through all the help I could find, and only discovered the project features, project objects, and project polygons.  So the obvious suggestion of the good ol’ “PROJECT” tool is a valid suggestion - it may be exactly what I need - where is it?

notice that my original request was “is there a hidden tool [...] that will project vertices either on to the trackplane or onto a polygon”, sounds like there is!

The Project tool is located In the ModGeom toolbox.

Note that the Plant tool (right next to it in the same toolbox) is similar except it moves vertices along the Z axis (instead of perpendicular to the trackplane that Project does.

Sum of the BITS!  That’s been there since MultiGen II on my old pre-SGI IRIS (remember they used to just be Silicon Graphics?)! I used it once about 15 years ago, completely forgot.  And by the same token, I can use the Plant tool in conjunction with my modified terrain to tune the basements of my geospecific buildings to be perfectly conformal!

glad I didn’t write any code ...

Plant was the tool more closely suited to my desire - I wanted to take an existing terrain skin, create a “flattening polygon” not necessarily in the horizontal plane, and project the vertices in the Z direction to the plane.  Plant only planted 6 vertices 8*(.  Project planted all the verts, and the horizontal deviation was small enough that there wasn’t too much error - I just ran flow texture from an outside poly to retweak the U,Vs and i’m good to go.

Fun Stuff!

If you have the tool Project Objects  you can do some serious funky stuff (yes even with vertex or construction points) -think itis only in Pro but I am not sure.

It lets you have vertical offsets from the target polys, and project only to terrain polys (so you could exclude rivers or roads if you temporarily set them to non terrain- hence a cluster of random vertex will not project onto these “clear” zones -which is great for then using the paste into selected tool feature!

(think trees or street lights ....)

Tanx!  I’ll check it out.

Project Polygons and Project Objects are very handy for such cases.

I haven’t tried Project Objects, but there were some issues with project polygons for my specific case.  Since I am operatiing on terrain, project polys would project entire polgons onto the trackplane or reference poly, creating cracks around the edges.  Also - I need to leave the order of the polygons alone for my own specific process (it’s a very complicated system).  they are generated with IDs in ascending order, so I could resort via script if I had to.

Selecting the vertices and using plain-ole project worked like a CHAMP, though, although for some reason it did not project many when I told it to project in pure-z, but they projected fine “perpendicular to trackplane”