Tree patterns

[Chgowiz]

Wow, it's been a long time since I've had that feeling of nervousness asking a question - not since the crusty days of posting questions to Usenet...

I've been following along the Zombie Nirvana videos and applying what I've learned to my map. One of the issues I've run into is the use and cleaning up of the forest patterns.

The way I end up doing the forest pattern, there ends up being a lot of trees that overlap. That makes a nice natural look (to me) and also adds a kind of 'side' (is that the right term?) view to the map, much like the mountains that Haphestet's tutorial shows.

When I'm 'cleaning up' the edges of the forest, what happens is I get these jagged areas that are caused by the overlap and erasing part of the tree that causes the overlap. The area isn't 'smooth' to my view. I always imagine that if someone hand draws a map, their forest edges are probably going to have a natural curve, but these jagged areas don't lend themselves to that.

I should add that I think that my drawing has gotten a lot better in the past two weeks, as have my forest patterns, but I'm still having the same problem with the jagged edges even with better looking patterns.

I've come up with a way of solving this, but I don't know if I'm missing a step or technique that perhaps I'm overcompensating for with my solution. Am I doing something wrong or is this something everyone just deals with in their own way?

Thanks.
Neurowiz

[Sigurd]

I think the tutorial suggests you basically erase the jagged bits by hand until everything is smooth. Then you make a custom brush and put in the trunks on the leading edge toward the viewer. This gives you a slightly iso look but is in keeping with the style.

If you're using a layer to 'erase' the visible trees (white is erase black is reveal) you can save yourself a lot of work by revealing or erasing to suit.


Sigurd

(I think everyone runs into this

Sometimes you can blend two different patterns to put in some variety and also perhaps some smoothness.

[Midgardsormr]

I had the same frustration with forest patterns in CC3. I decided to restrict myself to texturing my forests for the time being. I haven't tried using such patterns in Photoshop yet, though. I may eventually give that a try the next time I get set to do an illustrative overland map.

[Chgowiz]

I think the tutorial suggests you basically erase the jagged bits by hand until everything is smooth. Then you make a custom brush and put in the trunks on the leading edge toward the viewer. This gives you a slightly iso look but is in keeping with the style.

If you're using a layer to 'erase' the visible trees (white is erase black is reveal) you can save yourself a lot of work by revealing or erasing to suit.


Sigurd

(I think everyone runs into this

Sometimes you can blend two different patterns to put in some variety and also perhaps some smoothness.

I'm using a layer mask to erase part of it, and try to smooth it out. It's at that point (what you see in the examples) that shows up after I've used the mask to limit where the tree pattern is shown.

OK, so maybe my solution isn't a bad idea... I'll post it next.

[Chgowiz]

I hope you don't mind me posting this... I've been trying to make my forests look 'nice' to my standards for days now and having finally stumbled onto this, I thought either 1) I was doing something wrong or 2) this is just way too complicated. Probably the latter, as I'm sure one of the gurus have solved this... but I did manage to find a way of making the forest pattern technique and subsequent cleanup turn out a lot better.

It basically sums up to this:

1. Make a single pine tree brush. Make a single round tree brush. Scale appropriately.
2. Pencil/Paint a forest pattern (ala Zombie Nirvana video) with the two brushes.
3. Create mask and shape forests to areas you need (ala ZN video). 'Clean up' what you can.
4. Apply the mask to the forest layer. Turn off any background and use the eraser to clean up any leftover white/colored areas.
5. Rescale your brushes from #1 so that they match the pattern. (I have to do this as separate brush files, as my GIMP 2.2 doesn't do dynamic scaling of brushes [1]).
6. Using the Pencil and the brushes from #5, pencil in single trees around the jagged areas. Use the "Normal" mode on Pencil for the trees on the bottom and lower sides and "Behind" mode on Pencil for upper and top sides (gives an 'iso'? look)
7. Profit!

The pics below give a before/after look.

The trick for me was to use the same brushes for the pattern and for the 'cleanup' and to use Normal/Behind mode to make it look 'hand drawn'.

I hope this isn't too lame or completely obvious...

[1] I've found that while Linux is an awesome OS, moving from GIMP 2.2 to GIMP 2.4 on my old Edgy Eft Ubuntu installation will not be simple (the Edgy Eft repos were locked a long time ago...) so I have to do things the hard way. I'm feeling brave in updating my setup to support GIMP 2.4, but I'm also worried about breaking Ubuntu with the GTK updates.

Neurowiz

[RobA]

Another tip for when you draw the fill pattern is to is to try and draw it from the front to the back to keep the tree ordering.

-Rob A>