questions when recreating this style of Forest
Fersus
🖼️ 10 images Surveyor
Hi everybody!
I came across this map style while watching a let's play of a game from my youth, and I especially like this type of forest.
I'd like to recreate something like this. The idea is to draw the shape with a fractal poly with an inner glow, add the tree trunk via symbols along and then add the squiggly lines in the forest by hand. So far, so basic.
I've only two questions about this approach: when I use a fractal path for the squiggly lines, it resets it's settings every time. Is there a way for it to use the last setting?
and the second question is: is there a way to let CC3+ make the squiggly lines automatically? Maybe via a macro? I've never worked with macros so far and I was hoping that this might be a possibility? Can I set up a drawing tool, that starts a macro placing the tree trunks and the squiggly lines after I drew the shape?
Comments
I can't say if this would be possible in a single move because I don't know enough about macros, but if you had a texture for the forest top and a second texture for the trunks you could draw this as two similar polygons and move the top 'forest top' one up a bit to reveal the edge of the 'forest trunk' one.
You can set the fractalize settings in a drawing tool. Though I can't help you with either the suitable fills or a macro of any kind just at this moment in time you could familairise yourself with how to make and edit drawing tools and their macros from the Advanced Drawing Tools blog article by Remy Monsen.
Symbols Along could really use some sort of probability of placement adjustment that correlates the likelihood of placement to some direction (yes, I want symbols to only be placed on the outward-facing lighted parts of the image). Not sure how to describe that to users, though.
Thanks sue for the link, I'll dig into that!
@jslayton For efficiency, this would be nice, yes. But I don't think it's really necessary. This is what I created so far with "symbols along" and the trunks on the top are of course completely hidden by the poly, so that's fine...
I was thinking that it would also work to reduce density on those near-vertical parts of the forest to give a more uniform density.
Eventually, it would be nice if a variant of Symbols Along (and Symbols in Area) could have something like a macro that executes at each potential placement to determine position, angle, size, and so on for the final symbol. That sort of thing would be even harder to explain to end-users, though, especially parameter passing.
Heading further down the procgen trail, an elaborator that takes a path and set of edge details and replaces the original path with a new path based on the elaborations (like FRX, but more controllable) could be a lot of fun. However, I'm not sure that the CC3 macro model is really up to the elaboration task or to the symbol shader task.