Spring in the mountains...

After a little playing with Terragen, Forester and Blender (Fiber script (thanks RipSting) and Lsystem script (thanks blenderdungeon)) I came up with a decent mountain/lake scene. I’m not real happy with it. Not because it’s bad, but because it isn’t at all what I wanted. I can’t blame it on the pic I guess :-?

I was wanting a nice thick forest but I soon found out it’s difficult to make a NICE pine/fir tree with out a decent amount of verts. Then when you place 150 of them in a scene, things get REAL heavy and slow (besides some grass from the fiber script and particle flowers). So I ended up placing the trees in a seperate file and rendering them in groups and put them together in The Gimp. In the image it looks like there aren’t many trees but there are quite a few. I deleted all the ones that can’t bee seen in camera view. Also I eventually found out that the Forester2Blend script places more than one object in a location, up to 3 at times. I think next time I will use modelled trees up front and image textures further back.

Here it is with trees…
http://blendedmind.i8.com/images/highlake.jpg

…and without (I almost like it better without)
http://blendedmind.i8.com/images/highlakent.jpg

Comments please,
Brian J

it’s a nice pic, but I think the use of the terragen background makes it less good looking for two reasons:

  • there is no distortion (mounds, bumps, etc) where the trees are planted
  • the Blender and Terragen scene are light differently (could be solved using a Terragen lightprobe and Eeshlo’s IBL script)

Martin

Nice. I like the flowers. All in all a good scene with trees, flowers etc.
Paradox

Veeery sweet, I like all the details a lot!

Stefano

the trees are too big compared to the mountain.

Actually, that size of Pine tree tends to not have much of a lump around the base, but it would look better with a small swell. I was going to have the grass growing closer to the tree (taller) to hide it, but it got too tedious. I agree with the lighting. I like it up front but farther off the trees need to lighten up alot. I actually was looking into IBL a while back but haven’t been able to download the files (just tried again).

I agree, they looked better before rendering. I was dissapointed in the image as a whole so I didn’t bother to fix it any.

Thanks for the comments everybody!
Brian J

ps, anybody know how to get a decent STRAIGHT tree out of the lsystem script. I had a hard time getting them as straight as I did and still had to edit them some.

uh i hope im not too late on posting a crit. but in the first one the trees look like they’re just stuck in the ground, they dont look like they have any root structure. otherwise the pic isnt that bad.