Hello all,
I am kinda new to blender. I have a little bit knowledge of it and have gone though noob to pro tutorial. Now I’m having problems getting started. I want to make land scape scenes. I want the scenes to include:
Trees, Flowers, Grass, Hills, Sun on the horizon, River, Stuff like that.
I don’t want it to look cartoonish either. Most of my stuff ends up looking like that. Anyways does anyone have any advice on how to get started.
Well there are a few ways, one way is to buy all the items like the trees flowers… another is to buy a flower/tree generation program.
Blender has a script called L-System, which will create trees, there is also a script that will do ivy. i’m not sure about flowers.
The hard truth is that landscapes are incredibly hard to do without scripts. each item needs to be created, and is a project in its own right.
Alltaken
I have never used scripts in blender. How does that work? Do you just run it and it creates a tree?
Also I notice that is a problem with distance objects rendering. Is there away around that?
Each script is a program in it’s own right. They are installed in the scripts folder (just copy the script to the script folder, and it’s installed) and are run by finding the script in one of the menus. Take a look at the object menu, for example: one of the items on the menu is “Scripts.” If you mouse over to the “Scripts” item, you’ll see a sub menu with a dozen or so named scripts (preceded by a green snake icon – that’s a python, the scripts are written in Python, a programming language, and are also known as python scripts.)
Clicking on the python script menu item will run the script. Some will open in the button window, some will open in the active window, depends on how they are programmed. They will give you a graphic user interface, with numerical values to enter, choices to select… whatever is appropriate to the program.
Documentation is normally provided by the programmer, at a website dedicated to the script, the person who wrote the script, or somewhere else (pretty vague, huh?) so doing a search is usually in order. Sometimes script documentation will be written by a third party who has experimented with the script and figured out how it works and explains it to the community.
where is the l system? i cant find it
How about gen3? Have you used that? Think I’ll give that a try for trees 
Um wow…gen3 is way to powerful…LOL I had over 400 megs in blender running and it locked up. How do people generate such beautiful scenes without locking up? Is there a way to make huge landscapes with low polly counts?
hows this looking? my first tree with flowers using gen 3 
Looks cartoonish. Anything I can do to it?
I think a lot of people (me included) have trouble creating realistic-looking objects because of the material. Go outside, and look at some trees. Their bark (yes, textured and bumpy) doesn’t look like smooth, flat plastic.
Something you might consider making the equivalent of a cardboard-cutout for some of the objects (trees in the distance, etc). Basically, model it and render it individually and then edit the render in GIMP to make the blue background (or whatever you choose - maybe a particular color that isn’t anywhere else in the render) become transparent. Then, you can apply the edited render as a uv face texture to a plane, add a “tex face” material, and turn alpha on (I think). So it’ll look like a rendered tree (you might need to play with “shadeless”, too), but I’ll really be a flat plane.
You could try plant studio, (a free program) video tutorial vere…
http://learnblender3d.com/2007/07/23/plant-generator-for-blender-3d-make-plant-models/
Export them as vrml1 and import into blender.
Nice. Plant Studio looks like that will help with distance objects. Anyone know if a landscape generator? Something that might make rocks?
For the hills etc. I’d recommend using the Proportional Edit method, which you can enable with the “O” (not zero) whilst in Edit mode.
But before you “sculpt” out the mountain (or whatever you want), make sure you selected a right kind of falloff, which is, after you press O, located next to the PE (Proportional Edit).
The PE is located on the header of the 3d View, and looks like (when not selected like a donut with only a white border, and when selected, it becomes yellow.
After you selected the falloff etcetera, you’re mouse become (for example when using the move (or better yet, G (from Grab))a big circle, everything in this cicle will become affected by the PE.
Hope this helps.
Cool…I didnt think of using that. I leaned that from the noob to pro lessons.
Does anyone know how to use alpha blending in blender when importing a PNG? I have a PNG with transperancy that I want to show though when I put it on an object.
NGPLANT
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=83254
Very easy to use parametric tree and plant generator. Specially great for trees (low poly and high poly). You can include textures and export in .OBJ format.
Ok here I go… I have made my first land scape. I guess it’s a good start?
Here is what I did.
For the tree I used Gen 3 to make a tree with no leaves and sub branches. Then I added hair partials on the sub branches.
For the grass, same thing, hair partials on a grid. I still having trouble with the particals. I had to add 13000 partials to the hill grid and I still see space. Is there another way to make grass looking stuff or an partial option that can be used to make the grass fuller?
So am I off to a good start then? I’ll add some more to the landscape when I get some good plants from PlantStudio.
Well it’s a good start, but the grass is to tall and in to small density.
You’d better reposition the tree, more straight up.
