Automatic Forester

[waldronate]

It might be useful to add an option to make the forest into a tiling texture (remove the edge constraint and allow the image to wrap around). You can also do this by starting with a larger canvas and rendering the individual symbols twice (one time on the left/top and one time on the right/bottom edge) to get proper wrap. The final output would be cropped down to the smaller area. While this would seem to defeat the basic idea and purpose of the program it might be a generally useful tool for generating fills.

The last iteration does have one visual issue for me: my primitive visual system wants closer items to always be in front of items farther away. It wants to see forest areas as stretching off into the distance as though they are being viewed from above and the jumble of overlaps makes my eyes water... I had this problem with CCx maps long ago but the SYMSORT command fixed it for me. Generating the symbol entities for the whole area, sorting them on bounding box (the appropriate metric is the hard part) and then rendering them might make the whole thing a little clearer.

This program reminds me of the ancient SymFill command I did for CC2 back in 2002 (the current drawing tools have similar functionality, I understand). http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/SymFill/index.html has the toy from way back then. Some of the options on the UI dialog might be useful as suggestions for ways to get the forest variance up. There was a suggestion to use multiple symbols, but I never got around to it.

[Ramah]

These are all suggestions for Fluesopp.

I'm no programmer myself, knowing just enough to be able to get by programming basic functions. I've had no experience with Java until a week ago and I'm just messing around editing Fluesopp's work and trying to stumble on something that works for me.

As for your variables you have in your program, they are all basically in this one except for the symbol rotation . Unfortunately, I only have so many available to edit at run-time as I really don't know how to build up the UI. (my attempts at drop-down menus etc. ended with me pretty annoyed and I don't know how to apportion pieces of the work pane over to the UI).

I can change the scale of the trees, the x density and y density on the fly. All the jitter variables need changing in the program manually atm, although they do change depending on density and scale.

I'm quite intrigued to find out what this SYMSORT command is.

[waldronate]

Dropping symbols in CCx leaves them overlapping in the order they are placed (first placed are on the bottom). If you have to go back and fill in holes in an area of symbols then the hole patches will be on top, which looks funny. SYMSORT sorts the selected symbols based on their insertion point from top to bottom, left to right. This operation generally fixes the problems with insertion order. It will look funny from time to time with certain layouts but it works well enough for the most part.

[Ramah]

Hmm... well that is what this is doing. It goes down the image painting the highest trees in first from left to right. There shouldn't be any illegally painted trees in there (unless I screwed up the code, which I could well have done but in this particular case I'm not sure how to test it other than spotting a badly placed tree. And I'm ok with testing it that way. ).
There should be no trees overlapping another tree that is "lower" down in the image. That being said, there are certainly overlaps, some of which are more than I want (but it is hard to get an appearance of randomness without enough jitter). The overlaps should all be below another tree though although, as I say, some are closer than I would like. There could be some overlaps on the x-axis too if a tree is the same position on the y-axis, or as near as dammit, but these should be small.

If you can see any trees that blatantly overlap a tree that is lower than it then could you point it out to me?

[Fluesopp]

Just an update: Here is how much I've finished.
I'm still a bit unsure about how I should do the rest of the GUI. I need some config, a toolbar for drawing and erasing trees and a proper layer viewer like in photoshop.
And I need an efficient way of determining how the trees should be positioned in relation to the mask.

[waldronate]

If you can see any trees that blatantly overlap a tree that is lower than it then could you point it out to me?

The attachment shows the areas that bother me the most. They technically don't have overlap, but the way that some of the trees show large amounts of canopy near other trees without overlap gives the illusion that the sort order is incorrect.

[Ramah]

Fluesopp: Cool, I'll take a look at that tomorrow.

Waldronate: Ah. Well yeah, technically they aren't bad spots. I can smooth those spots out no problem but the more you smooth things like that out the more uniform the whole forest becomes. I'm hoping for magic algorithm stuff from Fluesopp's new version.

Anyway... one last image before bed. I added shadow support with a few very quick shadow brushes. They aren't great but you can get the picture I guess...



Again that took me only a few minutes to put together and I am actually very happy with it. There are lots of spots like you didn't like on the other one I guess, Waldronate, but maybe because I made the density thicker on this one the fact that there are more of those places helps them not stand out? It looks pretty good to me.

[Ramah]

Forgot to add the latest version of...er... this version, like I said I would.

Here it is.

[Ascension]

Now I know why I decided to never learn how to program anything other than my vcr...this is nice. Keep up the hard work, bro. Unless you're done, of course, then have a pint

[Ramah]

Ok, so I'm hoping that even Waldronate won't be able to find too many problems with this next image. This is just the tree outline layer png output. Nothing done to it of course.

I've put in a new form of jitter that I think works really well. Better than I thought it would really. My next attempt was going to be circular jitter, which in theory (ie. in my brain) would work really well. That would be where I select a tree and then rotate the six trees surrounding it by a small angle around it. Do this all over the forest and I think it could work great. But to be honest, I'm happy enough with the jitter on this and don't think I'll bother trying any more techniques for now.

http://www.cartographersguild.com/as...6&d=1264018146

I want to make a few more small changes to the program so that everything I've added is working fine then I'll upload everything and call my time on it done. I've now made the jitter more modular so I can switch each one on and off without changing anything else on the forest, so the effects of each can be seen and used or not as required. What I need to do though is figure out how to get more UI area so I can add edit boxes or more spinners to give more control over that jitter on the fly. A pop-up window would do it but I spend more time fighting with the damn java interface than anything else when I spend time on this. :S