Thread: Automatic Forester

That sounds really awesome. Do you have a screeny you could post to show the result?
And yeah... I know it is a pain to remove the trees around the edge of my forest sheet, made worse by the fact that the style I used had them all pretty damn close to each other. But I've used it a few times now and it is a LOT faster than doing the whole forest by hand a brush at a time. But yes, it is fiddly.

This sounds like it could be really cool.

A little walkthrough.

You may want to create a little forest island for your map. It's not large and it would be pretty simple, but maybe time consuming, to create the forest manually.

But, you also want a name, and a oddly shaped lake, and some towns around the island. And then suddenly it's not just pay and spray.

Instead, pain over wherever you want the forest to appear, on a second layer.

Turn off all other layers and save the forest mask as a PNG file, with transparency.

(image limit...)

(continued)

Open up the Mapper tool and click on the load button.

Check fill, if you want (looks seriously better) and save the file as a png file.

Now, open the new file in photoshop and drag it onto your map, holding shift as you do so; it snaps right to the center and align perfectly.

Add some fancy coloring and Voila! Your forest isle is complete.

edit: Oh, and since this is only a prototype, be careful. If you choose a file with data already on it, it will not ask you if you want to overwrite. It just does it.. (Gonna add that next, just in case)

Wow. That is awesome.

I can see a few odd bod trees on your screeny where they've gone over another but for a prototype version it's amazing.
Does it have the ability to load another pack of brushes?

Have some rep to help keep your heart warm as you continue to develop this.

If you want something similar in Gimp, here is a script I wrote to do much the same thing, using gimp brushes.

An example of its use are the forests for my Ascadia map.

-Rob A>

a suggestion for you: would it be possible to implement a size feature?

for example, on me Darklands map, the default sized tree brushes (~30px) were way too large, but when dropped to 1/3 (~10px) they were perfect. Or would it be too hard to program in? I suppose one alternative would be to take your masked area, triple it in size, and save that as the png, then shrink it when it's done.

Also, another suggestion would be a way to increase/decrease density (more scattered trees, or more overlapping etc).

Wish I could program so I could help on this.. (and this is in no way trying to slight your work, just giving you feedback as a potential user as to the things that would be useful features to me). Repworthy, for sure!

What's the file-size limit (resolution)?

I'm working on a size feature. It's not that hard, I just need to figure how to properly scale down the brush images. For now your workaround works.
And I've experimented with the density. I had a small UI going, but it was just weird and crashed all the time, but it does work.

And the file-size limit is pretty large. I'm not sure as I haven't tested it yet. Please give feedback if you experience problems.

edit: It can't load another brushpack. What I have done is to make each brush into two images; one with color, and one 'alpha' image. So you could manually replace each brush with your own if you want.

I'll let you know - try number one will be on my largest image...