Blender Forest

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi Everyone,

I’m trying to figure out the best way to do a forest scene in blender.

I’ve seen the stuff about blender world forge, but I can’t get it going, and I’m interested in figuring out how to do it myself anyway…

Any ideas?

Thanks :o)

2

dupliverts

3

dupliverts are too regular, i would suggest lots of alpha mapped tree textures, with real mesh trees in the foreground, and using either the beast plugin, or the drop2ground plugin to scatter them over your mesh, but if you aren’t using the beast plugin just be sure to mix up the scale and rotation a bit so it doesn’t look like the same tree repeating itself over and over. as to how to get trees and alpha mapped trees, use either the latest version of the lsystem plugin, or a program such as arboro, then once you have the tree and you want to make it into an alpha mapped tree texture, render it with render settings ‘rgba’ and ‘premul’ with file type png. to get a plane to read the texture right, set it to shadeless, in texture buttons click ‘use alpha’ then in material buttons, click ztransp, and turn the alpha slider all the way down.

4

I second the best plugin

Best way to go about this IMHO

5

Hi Guys, thanks for all of this great advice :o)

Ok, I’ve got two slightly more technical questions now…

  1. is there a way to use vertex paint to control the distribution of dupliverts?

  2. is there a way to create multiframe materials that change frame based on the rotation of the object they are on?

heh heh, now that I’ve typed them they’re pretty scary looking questions… the aim of the first one is to be able to paint trees onto a terrain, and the aim of the second one is to have tree textures on billboards automatically change to a more ‘overhead’ bitmap of a tree when your camera increases it’s altitude and looks down on the trees…

Has anyone seen or heard of anything like these two things being done before? Maybe there is easier way of getting the same results?

we could call it ‘freedTree’ ;o)

6

I ran across this free tree generator, not sure if it’ll work with Blender, but check it out:
http://www.frecle.net/treed/