Naserian

[wdmartin]

Thanks! I guess. And if Pripyat looks like that, well, I am heartily sorry for everyone in Pripyat.

I spent a bunch of time working on the trees. I've got sixteen layers of understory now, and three layers of smaller trees.

Then I spent ages trying to get more color variation in them. The Pattern Overlay adjustment that was providing the tree texturing proved stubbornly resistant to any kind of modification. Rasterizing the layer effects worked poorly: the trees wound up with a weird sort of halo around them, which looked awful. So eventually I gave up and removed the Pattern Overlay adjustment. The initial effect of that was ... amusing.



Apparently I had a hue jitter set on my forest brushes which had been covered up by the pattern overlay. Welcome to the psychedelic jungle!

I fixed that by putting some clipping layers full of green texture on top of those, then adding lightness adjustment layers to some of them with cloud masks.



I am not sure whether it's better or not. There are a lot more trees, sure. They're still pretty similar in color, though with at least a little more color variation. But I'm not sure it's actually, you know, better than it was before. I'll have to sleep on it.