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How to build good-looking forests

Started by Rady, January 05, 2010, 09:25:26 AM

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Rady

First, this thread started over at "Show us you Rivers and Creeks ..", cause I had an exchange there with ShultzCity and thingfishs regarding one littel creek of mine ..

I downloaded the Meadowshire Tree Mod ans started to place some trees (not with the God Mod tool, but with single clicks - the god mod tool won't work 'cause of the terrain beeing to flat, so no trees a planted).

Now my problem is the "multi-click" function and finding a place to plop a certain tree or bush. Its no problem for the first one. But if I e.g. want to plant several bushes beneath each other, either
- the game won't let me plant the desired bush ('cause there's not enough space?) or
- the flora planted before changes to the next type in the click cycle - so instead of a bush I end up with a tree.

See the following example: I placed a tree (1), abush (2), a second tree (3), and when placing the fourth tree - voila, everything ruined.



Additionally 'cause of that there always is lot of free space between my singel plants ..

And now try to delete this one tree without destroying the surrounding flora ...

As you can see in the picture: I wanted to place a littel group of that bush. The bush is say the third in the click-cycle of that forest lot. Now how do I place the definite flora on the place I want it to have? How do I know (even using the grid) where to place my mouse pointer so the existing bush won't turn into a tree?



So what am I missing? How do I get a small, dense group of that bush?
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.

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Ennedi

You didn't miss anything, Rady  :). Your post is also very well thought and it gives a good opportunity to explain some forest secrets  ;)

1. First of all I must say it is very difficult to make ploppable flora for use in God or Mayor Mode. Cycledogg was a pioneer in that area and he was the only person who knew anything about adjusting flora parameters for a long time. Now more people are interested in it, but there are still only a few of them. Cycledogg's tree controllers are very well designed, but there are still many parameters to adjust, now we know more about ploppable trees parameters and we are going to solve many problems in future.
Creating a single ploppable tree is nothing special and we have quite many sets of them in the Mayor Mode. But to create natural looking forest we need a lot of various trees. Actually we have a few hundreds of tree models now. If we would want to use them as single trees, our ploppable flora menu would be horribly long, and it would be still very difficult to create a forest plopping trees one by one.
Another thing are so called Tree Controllers which enable us to create forests in the God Mode. In that case we use the flora brush, it has a circular shape (we can adjust its size by clicking Shift 1 - Shift 0) and we expect a variety of trees when we use it.

2. To solve these problems we use tree families. The tree family is a group of trees (of the same kind but various shapes and sizes, or of different kinds) connected into a chain. The first click gives you the first tree in the chain, the second click - the second tree and so on. We have usually about 5 trees in the chain.
There are two parameters deciding about placing trees:
a) the tree size (located somewhere in the Flora parameters property). It decides about the minimum distance between this tree and the next one, and how large area will be bulldozed when we want to remove the tree. You can observe that we can't bulldoze less than 1x1 tile (even for small bushes), and we need to bulldoze 2x2 tiles for some largest trees. This is a nature of the bulldozing tool and we can't do anything with it, so obviously everybody who wants to create a nice landscape has to destroy some of his hard work every time he makes a mistake  :)
b) The Flora Cluster Max Radius. If you will plop a tree and then want to plop the next one, the first tree will stay at its place if you plop the second tree in the bigger distance than Cluster Max Radius. If you plop the second tree closer than the Cluster Max Radius, the first tree will be replaced by the next one.
If you will press the mouse button and keep it a while, you can quickly go to the last tree in the chain. It happens very often when you plop your forest by pressing the mouse button and dragging. If you drag too slow, trees have enough time to replace one by another and you get the forest consisting only of the last tree in the family  :)

3. If the tree size would be less, we would get more dense forests. Actually I think many of our forests available in Tree Controllers should be more dense. But we should find a compromise here. If we would be able to place trees very close one to another, tree models would interpenetrate and it would lead to unpleasant graphic glitches. However I think at least some of future tree controllers will give us more dense forests.

4. If the Cluster Max Radius would be very small, we would need to plop again exactly where the first tree is plopped to get the second one. It would make plopping forets by clicking and dragging even more difficult and we would get mainly the first model in the family. It would be a bad result too.
But again I think we will modify this parameter too, now we have much more experience.

I will try to prepare a few suggestions about creating forests, but it will be much better to show them on pictures. I will have a good opportunity now because I'm going to make forests in a few new cities, but it will take a few days. Maybe I will be ready after weekend.
Anyway I hope my information helped you at least a bit  ;)

Adam
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thingfishs

#2
Hey Rady,

A few thoughts on a subject that has frustrated me as well.

There are various ways to deal with the situation. Different MMPs (Mayor Mode Ploppables) have different sized "active" areas, it's possible you won't be able to create exactly what you want with the tree you're using but you should be able to get something pretty close. (unless you learn about modifying the tree files in which case it could be altered to your liking)



Many of the full sized cycledogg tree controllers have a large active area and can be very frustrating to achieve fine detail with, they are more for somewhere between god mode and individual planting. This photo shows the 5 clicks of the oak, maple & elm tree (cycledogg) which is part of the Columbus terrain mod (I think) as well as others (I think) These are about as close as they can go without changing into the undesired object. But subsequent clicks do create small groves of trees which could achieve what you are after.



These terrain mods/tree controllers usually add a large number of trees to your menu, both full sized and growing. The growing versions, shown here, can be placed much closer so you might be able to achieve what you are after this way over time. (I think I forgot what I was demonstrating when I took this one, but rest assured you can get the young bushes, all the same, quite close)



The active area is only for each type of tree so you might be able to combine similar or different types to get your effect.



Lastly I can recommend at least one pack of brilliant trees, CP's models from last year, made into an MMP by Hooha47. These trees, a small selection of which can be seen in shot, can be placed very close without effecting each other and cycle through the whole series of options twice so you can correct any mistakes you make. On top of that if you miss it twice it will turn blank, not leaving you having to bulldoze a whole clump of trees to erase one bad apple. The downside of this is that you can't then place anything on top of the blank space.

http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2291

ShultzCity

Hi Rady,

Although I can't compete in the knowledge contained in Adam's and thingfishs' posts, I can suggest one thing (however unrelated to the main pproblem). When using the Meadowshire Tree Controller in God Mode, make sure you zoom out to the top 2 levels. The 'system' that the controller uses to leave gaps in the flora means that trying to plant on a small scale often leaves undesirable results  &mmm

Sorry I couldn't be of more help, I myself am still trying to get my head around the technical side of flora.
I'd love it if you could check out my photography! Click on of the links below:
http://www.jacobshultz.com.au
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jshultzphotography/

Rady

Thanks to both of you ... as I already discovered in another thread, I obviously do have anything that's needed to create landscape like yours. So the only thing I'm missing is experience ... which will change as time goes by  :P
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.

Visit my BAT thread: Slow BAT steady - Rady's first BAT attemtps