Symbols Along with Jitter

111ragnarok

I'm drawing a cavern and I want rocks and rubble along the edges. It's too big to create the symbols manually. I'm a hobbyist not a professional and spending several hours placing symbols on a map I will only use a couple of times is just too much.

So, I created a symbol list and tried to use the Symbols Along feature to draw symbols along the cavern wall polygon. However, this only draws symbols exactly on the polygon line. I can copy and shrink it with the offset feature so the symbols aren't drawn right on the border. However, without some kind of jitter to randomly place them away from the polygon line, the whole thing looks unnatural.

Is there a feature like that in CC3+?

jslayton

A random distance perpendicular to the path for Symbols Along is on the wish list, but that doesn't help you today.

Symbols in Area (SYMFILL) has a feature that will only place symbols within a certain distance of the edge and align symbols to the local gradient. It may not get you exactly what you want, but it might get close. Basically, fill the whole cavern floor rather than trying to fill only along the edges. If you want to fill outside the line, using CONTOURSM on the cavern floor before using SYMFILL can generate an inflated version of the floor to do random things on.