Brush spraying for forests ?

[Naima]

Hi , I was wondering if there is a way to use a brush to paint trees quickly ...

Lets suppose I make several tree types, and then I collect them into a brush , is there a way to spray them randomly so that they always get one oin front of the other to create dense forests?

Not sure if I was clear lol ...

[Azélor]

Yes but only if the brush is plain with no transparency. Otherwise you will always see the other trees staked on top of the other if they are not placed right. So you can't really have random brushes that look good.

The solution I've found was to use the duplicate tool, doing one kind of tree at a time. To save time, you can premake patches of forest, duplicate them and fill the gaps manually with individual trees.

[kacey]

You can do it with gimp, one of the cool things about gimp is you can make coloured and animated brushes. So you could make a bunch of trees or clumps of trees whatever you prefer and put each one on a separate layer, you can then make an animated brush from those layers so it will cycle through the variations on each layer as you paint, kind of like cc3 does.

And for the problem of overlapping edges showing through, just fill in each tree with white, not the whole layer just behind the tree, so it’s a white tree outlined in black and after you’re done stamping down all you’re trees just set the blend mode to multiply and it will remove the white parts but hide any overlaps because they were already covered with white.

Another alternative is to just paint the trees whatever colour you want, one on each layer and animate the brush and voila tree variation and no overlapping edge issues.

I won’t go into how to animate a gimp brush because it’s been along time since I’ve done it but a quick you tube search should pull up some tutorials for you.

Just make sure if you’re painting white that it doesn’t poke out from outside the edge or it will remove bits from the tree behind it, and it can take some fiddling to get the spacing right.

I had this working pretty well a few years back, and I could literally just paint lines, I did it with mountains though it’s the same concept.

[Mouse]

You are describing an Image pipeline brush (GIMP terminology).

This video shows how to make them yourself in GIMP. Sorry if you use other software, but I shouldn't think it will be very different to GIMP in the basic method.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL-hKpnrAK4

People often say they are disappointed with image pipeline brushes, but that's possibly because they don't set them up with enough space between each image. This is a simple scribble done with a very simple tree pipeline I made myself, with the spacing set to 300 (3 tree spaces between each pasted tree). The brush was designed to do very small scale forests on a regional map, so the trees themselves are more or less just simple green blobs with a bit of shading on each one. That's the important bit - the shading has to be there on each tree, or you just end up with a flat green mass.



EDIT: ninjad by Kacey. Hey Kacey

EDIT2: You can also do this in Krita. The method is very similar, but the process is a lot more detailed with a lot more tweaks available to play with

[kacey]

You can also do it in Clip Studio Paint which is a really nice programme and fairly inexpensive, check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDRGggNwSf4

[J.Edward]

I agree - clip paint/manga studio is a very good program.
I use it for drawing often.
For drawing, it's better than photoshop, in my opinion.
It might be for painting too, i just haven't had the time to get fully up to speed on that.
Most of the brushes I have created for painting were made for PS and i don't think you can use PS brushes in manga studio.

[kacey]

I agree with J.Edward clip studio has some really nice brushes for doing linework, and I actually like it better for painting then Photoshop. The oil paint brushes and blenders work really well. When I'm painting something like a face in photoshop I'll send it over to clip studio for blending it just does a much nicer job and it doesn't lag the way photoshop does. And just incase any one is interested it's touch friendly and works really well on the surface pro tablets something that can't be said for most panting apps... And it does vector too... Sorry I went a little off topic.

And J.Edward I'm pretty sure you can get you're Photoshop brushes into clip studio, I haven't done it but there are tutorials on you tube, the clip studio brush settings are pretty robust so even if you just loaded in the tip shape you'd probably be able to fiddle with the settings to get something similar...or better.

[Naima]

Oh nice , so I didn't brainstorm something non exhisting, but How I can do this in PS ? I only know and use PS for painting.
Is there some kind of terminology to search for ?

[Naima]

IS this something similar?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaxHJgo_Y2I

[kacey]

Photoshop brushes are limited to grey scale as far as I know. You could make some trees on a layer and start cutting and pasting. I have not found an easy way to do this in ps so if you come up with one please let us know. Gimp is free and has similar functions to photoshop, if you know photoshop you shouldn’t have a problem figuring out gimp if only to make you’re tree layer then bring it back into photoshop. Or you could just draw it all by hand tree by tree which I think is better because you get practice by doing this and you will improve you’re skills while you’re at it and quite frankly maps just look better when they don’t have a bunch of repeats in them. I’ve given up trying to make the cut and paste method work, it’s faster and easier to just draw each one individually and it makes the map more authentic in my opinion.