Did a lot of "playing" with this phenomenon today. I'm convinced it is a bug in IS3. When in IS3, it is picking up FULL AUTOGEN. Scenery Complexity at EXTREMLY DENSE and vegetation density on EXTREMELY DENSE. When I take a screen shot of that and compare it to what I'm seeing when IS3 is "on" they are the same.
I usually keep my autogen vegetation on VERY DENSE. So when I come back in without IS3 "on" that's what I'm seeing. When I go to IS3, the FULL AUTOGEN is kicking in.
Also, the object groups I was putting in were the Hemlock Groups. The same as what is in the autogen to keep it all looking the same. So when the extra elements came in, they looked just like the ones I had placed.
It's not that it is such a big deal, just interesting to KNOW. I can see an advantage to this actually happening. It tells you what it looks like if someone is running full autogen so you don't place things incorrectly.
Pretty sure this is the reason.
I still cannot figure out why the "flatten" won't work with SBuilderX ... still working on that one.
Doug