Manually painting forests

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GregHart1965
Posts: 649
Joined: Sun Apr 12, 2015 7:21 am

Manually painting forests

Post by GregHart1965 » Thu Jan 28, 2021 12:48 pm

In some places the OSM data is very limited or inaccurate. You may wish to paint the forests/trees by hand - this is especially so for photorealistic sceneries where the image shows up every omission and error glaringly. Selecting areas with the magic wand is ok for very dense (solid) tree coverage but in many places this is simply not the case. It is also perfectly possible to paint individual trees which can be very effective in adding a sense of 3D to the otherwise smooth background textures (note that these only display properly if the 'tree density' setting in 'Set Up' is set to 'very high').

The trees and forest are all painted on two separate layers in your preparation images labelled 'b' and 's'. For individual tees use a hard edged pencil (not brush) with the brush tip set on 'square brushes'. The size must be set to 4 pixels so that one pixel will result when reducing to terragen forest map size. One pixel = one tree.

For scattered trees I use a pattern stamp to sprinkle trees rapidly over large areas. These do not match the images exactly but this does not really matter in most cases as the effect is the same 'in game'. For more intricate clumps of trees it is best to simply use the individual pencil to draw them (very time consuming!). Below are the pattern stamps I use - if you want to copy these you will need to select the black only and copy that into an image file with a transparent back ground. The image size is 64x64 pixels. In photoshop you then click 'edit' and select 'define pattern' - give the pattern a name you will recognise.
light coverage.jpg
medium coverage.jpg
dense coverage.jpg
Note that the patterns will leave some dots of less than 4 pixels - SO when you are making the terragen sized forest maps you MUST downsample the image size BEFORE you bitmap the image (create bitmap using a 50% threshold). This ensures that you not end up with any half lit pixels but have a clearly defined image. Half lit pixels will read as fully coloured by the game so your tree areas may overlap areas you don't want them to.
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GregHart1965
Posts: 649
Joined: Sun Apr 12, 2015 7:21 am

Re: Manually painting forests

Post by GregHart1965 » Thu Jan 28, 2021 1:02 pm

The process is ludicrously time consuming but is probably worth the effort (? - maybe?). One last thing to note is to make the colours of the tree image match the colours of photoreal background so that the trees blend in to the landscape - that way you can be more conservative with how many trees you paint and yet still have a finished product that looks harmonious and natural (The image below is from before I realised this - the trees in it still look a bit out of place)
Shot1.jpg
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drh
Posts: 13
Joined: Sun Oct 29, 2017 6:36 pm

Re: Manually painting forests

Post by drh » Thu Feb 11, 2021 10:07 am

Alternatively you might look into editing OSM data and submit your changes upstream, and generate forests from there. There might be better OSM editing tools available and you contribute to a data set that has value beyond your current project.

I have to add that I didn't go that route myself yet, because the OSM forest data for EastGermany was quite good, but I have considered it more than once when fixing up the water alpha in textures.
Image

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