Automatic Forester

[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.

[Coyotemax]

If I replaced it with my own brushes, I would *totally* use that at this point. Dunno about others, but I'd be ready to start using it as of now *oh yes, rep worthy*

[Ramah]

That isn't hard to do, as long as you stick to certain naming conventions, although at the moment the shading layer would be a problem as it is set to use multiple shade brushes for every tree. So unless your tree outlines were very similar in shape and size it would look pretty bad. It's on my todo list of little things to fix before I sign off on this but I'm still unsure as the best way to go about it, naming-conventionwise. I want to keep the ability to have multiple shade brushes per tree, but then when you add in multiple trees the naming gets more awkward. I guess Shade1_1, Shade1_2 etc. like I suggested several pages pack is the way to go.
Of course, you don't need to use the shading layer if you don't want to.
I also need to make a small addition so that brush sets can be changed on the fly. It can already do it except I haven't added the option to the UI yet.

[Coyotemax]

I do recall the swapping of files with different brushes and naming conventions, wouldn't be too bad to put in that work for me. The shading i'm not as worried about, but I wouldn't mind putting forth the extra effort to create that as well.

I'll still wait till you're done, it just occurred to me that it would be perfect for the project I'm currently doing