Hi Tesign,

You are correct. Getting use to Jungle 3D (or 2D) does take some time. When you consider the long history of art and paint media, painting with foliage is very different compared with what has gone before.

The idea of Jungle 3D is to make painting trees & foliage a lot easier and faster. And since many of the traditional painting problems are solved in the nozzles themselves, the learning curve is really pretty fast. Like you say, it just takes some getting use to.

With that in mind, we offer a series of free tutorials on painting trees, foliage structures like canopies, tiling patterns of foliage for 3D terrain models, shadow textures, etc. I think of them as training wheels, a way to get the hang of it.

Unfortunately, they're mostly for Painter and PSP. We have so few inquiries from PP users that it's hard to justify the time it takes to write them.

In a nut shell, painting trees is like making a sandwich. Three layers are usually involved. The bottom layer, or slice of bread, represents the background leaves on the far side of the tree. The trunk and limbs represent the peanut butter and jelly filling. The foreground leaves represent top slice of bread.

When they layers are finished, you collapse them to one layer, load the layer selection, save it and flatten the image before saving in a format that preserves the mask and is recognized by the 3D app.

Now sandwichs can get a whole lot more sophisticated than that, but this works really well to start. The only thing you have to remember is it's 2D space. If the sun is at your back, the leaves on the far side of the tree will be in the shade. So, you have to darken that layer after you paint it (easy enough).

Similarly, it can look very cool to have soft leaf shadows dapplied on the visible parts of the trunk and limbs. So, you preserve transparency on the trunk and limb layer and spray some leaf shadows on them.

You can even paint a separate round shadow texture for use beneath the tree, so it appears to have full volume. I usually apply a soft spot to the texture panel as that pushes the look of volume even more.

So painting with nozzles does take some getting use to because the process is so different from traditional painting. Once you've got it down though, it's about as easy as riding a bike.

Getting the perfect tree is something else, however, but that has to do with artistry and effort. I use photographic models otherwise my trees begin to look the same. (I think it's a visual memory thing).

As for a Photopaint version of Tree Forestry, maybe in the future. Since Corel owns them both, who knows what they'll do. They sure don't tell us. We find out when you do, usually later because we can't buy every new version when it comes out.

I hope this helps. If you have the time, try the tree tutorial for Painter and then apply the layer principle in PP. We include the necessary files with the tutorials so you don't have to buy anything, although you will need Painter 5+ or PSP 6+.

Thanks for the interest everyone. Have fun.