Hi guys, 
I have posted a couple of times in the fourm and still consider myself quite new since between playing my guitar, engineering and vue modelling I haven't been able to spend a whole lot of time with vue. I am trying to make time and learn vue. 

I am looking at making a scene where I want the backdrop to be rich golden sand (typical of mid eastern desert) and in the middle of it all a palm tree. and perhaps some water. Maybe use fancy things to model the leaves on the tree, maybe unrealistic objects like boats, or other things rather than leaves. 

Can some one guide me as to how can I start to model a rich desert terrain, and secondly how to go about changing leaves to other objects and populating the tree with it in a realistic order. 

I would much appreciate anyone's step by step guidance or links that might help me with this scene. 

thanks 

planker, first we need to know which version of Vue you are using.

Hi bruno, 
Its Vue 6 extreme....

can't you use the palm tree that comes with Vue ? they are pretty good (from memory anyway - not used that one in a while) and you can fiddle with the textures in the plant editor

Ok, so for your terrain, I would create a procedural terrain In the terrain edito, under the sphere that reprsents the altitude production function, click the load button, and load one of the altitude functions preset from the visual browser. There are preset desert functions, just play a bit with the function scale in the tarrin editor to get something you like. For the material, I'd recommend using layered materials for added realism. For the base layer, I'd recommnd the sand dunes materials from the material layers collection. Then add some flat sand on top of it. Vary the altitude:slope of the the second layer and add fuzziness for all parameters you change, so materials will blend more naturally together. You' now have your desert. For the trees, you have 2 basic options: ecosystem painter, where you choose the species you want to populate your terrain with, and then paint them wherever you want. Great powerful tool for precise placemnt of your instances.
Or you can use the ecosystem material option, where the eco depends on the underlying material. Here you can't place trees as you like, it's more random, but you can drive the density with a function, or even a bitmap ( create a b&w bitmap in paint program with your name on it, and use it as a density function in Vue, so your name will be written in palm trees!), you can also act upon the rotation and orientation of the instances with this method, by using the corresponding tabs in the editor.
Now about editing plants, I suggest you have a look at the documentation pdf that come with Vue, there is a big chapter about this. Too long to explain here.

Hi Frank, 
Perhaps I could, though I want to model other things besides regular leaves, say paper bills (perhaps like a money tree) or something else. So how can I go about placing other objects besides leaves as leaves in a realistic fashion. 

thanks

Thanks bruno will give it a try and post the render on here

For the leaves, just go to the plant editor, and replace the alpha and image map of the leaves with your own alpha and image map of your paper bills. And don't forget to send us some seeds for the money tree, it could be useful $$$ ;)

I thought that quite a while ago, someone here posted some pics of a tree full of fruit or birds... maybe back in the early V5i days.  The distribution of things in the tree was done using an ecosystem I thought.

If this was how it was done, maybe you could do it that way somehow.