Hee-hee, I'm probably guilty as charged.Originally Posted by Solomiranthius
Hee-hee, I'm probably guilty as charged.
Great, glad to here everything worked out OK. Let me know if you run into any other problems though.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
I have been following some tutorials on here and including this mini-tut and some of Rob A's tutorials... All i want to say is thank you! I've recently been getting into map making to create game maps for a friends online rpg game. these tutorials have helped out immensely.
btw, first time poster =)
Welcome to the Guild Melkor! And thanks for the feedback; glad to here this little tut was of some help to you.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
Arsheesh, thanks for this tutorial. I've run through it about - oh, three or four times to get a feel for it. I really like the results. Playing with the colors helps quite a bit. I was wondering if you have any suggestions for brush shape when adding the stragglers? I've been experimenting with the vine and galaxy brushes because the solid round and square brushes seemed to create a visible pattern as I added in the individual trees. Looking at your examples I like how well your individual trees follow the general shape your forests. Here's what I've been able to accomplish. This is just one section of my current WIP. Any suggestions?
Hello there ProfGremlin, glad you found the tut to be of some use. Hm, you know I haven't actually tried using other brushes besides a hard round brush to stamp on the stragglers. However I set the size of the brush fairly small, .5px I believe, and the jitter fairly high. Then I used somewhat jittery, circular motions to stamp on the trees. While I could detect a slight repeating pattern, both the size and the jitter of the brush helped to minimize it. However if you find in experimenting that other brushes work better for you, fantastic.
I'll mention a few suggestions. First, instead of using the stamp tool on the outside border of the forests, which, with the jitter turned up will cast trees everywhere, try painting inside the forests themselves. That way, while most of the trees end up underneath the forest (and hence out of view), the jitter effect will ensure that enough trees make it to the outside border. That way, you don't end up with such a clear cut off point between the dense forests, and their sparser edges. Second, I'm not sure but it looks like you've added a drop shadow to the main forest patterns, but haven't done so for the individual trees layer. Adding a drop shadow to the individual trees helps them to blend in more naturally with the forest patterns. Third, I noticed that your main forest patterns have a fairly stark white north-eastern edge. This looks somewhat unnatural and makes it difficult to smoothly integrate individual trees along those edges into the main forest patterns. Now I'm not sure what is causing those edges to be so light, but one way you might try to fix it is to set one of your mid-toned green "Tree Color" layers to Multiply, and then add additional lighter colored yellow and green layers to compensate for the darkness that results.
I hope that helped, but if you try these tips out and still aren't satisfied, let me know and I'll run through the tun on my own again and see if I can offer you any other suggestions.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
Arsheesh, thanks for all the suggestions. I'm grateful for the help. You're right, I hadn't added the drop shadow for the individual trees. This was due to the fact that the area in the screen shot was only one small part of the map and I had wanted to get individual trees setup around all the forests before adding the drop shadow. As for that stark white line on the northeast edge you mentioned, I've found that it is generated during the trees bump map step. I had changed the azimuth angle to 35 so the shadows of the trees would match those of the mountains. Doing this caused this white line to appear. I was able to mitigate it some by boosting the elevation to 40. The line is still there but somewhat subdued. I also found that compensating for darkening helped.
I still haven't managed to get my forests looking quite like yours. I think that part of this is due to the scale difference. Your examples in post #9 are 1,134px × 1,074px while my map is 2400 × 3200 pixels. I think this has an effect of how detailed the cloud render is. I'm not really sure, as all this is new to me, but it seems that the smaller the map the more granular the clouds are; while you may zoom out on the topography layer the cloud layer doesn't change hence the forests smooth out. I'm not sure I've explained that at all well.
I did a fair amount of experimenting with different settings for generating the cloud noise layers. I even tried the Felimage Noise plugin. I think that Felimge Noise has some potential here, at least on larger maps. I need to experiment more with the settings though to generate a better understanding of how to create a more three-dimensional appearance to the forests contours as you've managed to do.
In order to integrate the forests with my map a bit better I changed the colors around some. This had the effect of no longer matching the colors of the individual trees very well. So, while the shape effect that the individual trees has helped, the color difference takes away from that some. I think I need to figure out how to generate those individual tree patterns. Any suggestions?
Here's may latest generation doing my best to incorporate your suggestions:
Last edited by ProfGremlin; 09-05-2010 at 01:45 AM. Reason: spelling error
Hello again Profgremlin. I've been a bit preoccupied over the weekend but I plan on running through the tut again tomorrow and I'll try to get back to you then with some suggestions then.
Thanks, Arsheesh, I'm grateful for your help. I've been a bit embedded in other directions myself. I have a completely different style of map I've been asked to make so I'll be putting this one on hold for a little bit.
Arsheesh, I'm ready to tackle this project again. Hopefully I can pickup where I left off. In order to integrate my forests with the individual trees I need to create a new pattern for them with colors that match my forests. Do you mind giving me some direction on that? Did you use any particular technique or was it more randomly placing color on the canvas?
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