This has been a popular little project lately, lol. I tried a different technique to make the trees this time, like anything it has advantages/disadvatages. Each tree is four 2D faces. My girlfriend waltzed in..."oh, it looks like a golf course"...A Golf Course?! I've since banned her (from the computer room) Uh, 2 terrains, a cube for the water, 171 "trees", 12mb file(I think I can get that smaller), 5 minutes to render, 1.5ghz amd althlon xp, on win2kpro. AgentSmith

Why cube for the water? If you pull the camera close to the terrain, an infinite plane would work as well, I think. It's quite good.

Looks like a golf course..... jokes apart, It seems a diorama, I haven't understand if this was your purpose, if so... great execution, on the contrary... the terrain are great maybe the textures need to be more smaller. bye bye agent... (now I auto-bann myself from your PC room).

You'd spend a week kickin the ball out of the woods. LOL Looks more like a game reserve(without the critters)

Textures need to be smaller? Oh...do you mean to reduce the scene file size? Actually, yes and no. I forgot the textures for the trees are 512x512, lol...kinda overkill for how small and far away they are, I just forgot to resize them before I used them. That, and I'm using three tree textures (and alpha masks) to represent the four angles that the 2D faces are set at. (0, 45, 90, 135 degrees) I think just one texture & mask at 256x256 will be just fine... My trees here need variety in their tone, each one is the same color/brightnessm, makes it look flat. Water's fairly boring. Yeah, I made it to look like a diorama, I always do that when I'm practicing on stuff like this. (anal-retentive) AgentSmith

trees are good but too much similar... but I was speaking about rocks' texture they seems to big compared to the other. max respect to you, my are ment to be constructive opinions but I continue with my opinion... it looks like a golf curse! (the linguistic error was intentional)

Not enough fairway to be a golf course, and no sand traps...hummmmm, I expect to see little diorama animals, this would be a great start on a Christmas train garden, a few tunnels, some track looping, a train, few bridges and maybe a few evergreen trees =)

Agent Smith, Don't be too hard on the girlfriend - My first impression was that of a golf course - until my senses kicked in. I think what Vasquez was trying to say is the scale of the texture for the rocks may be too large - I noticed that too. I'd like to see the the trees from another camera angle - this technique looks interesting. - TJ

What's a train set without a wreck? Add some Amtrack trains and you are set to go or not go. Looks cool, not seen that sort of look from a Bryce picture. Could do one of the civil war reenactments. Add some lego parts and you have a lego playset.

YES!, that's what it reminds me of, a train set/diorama/thing. Actually, the rock aren't rocks (plural), it is just rock (singular). Meaning it isn't really rocks, stones, boulders, etc. It's just giant slabs of rough...granite or something, in the ground, that happen to be exposed at certain points. I got the textures off the CD of Issue #28 of 3D World magazine. AgentSmith

Dunno why, but I think of SimCity before the town exists... Now where should I put that powerplant? And the roads? Actually, something like this would be a good starting point for an arial picture of a town.

Agent Smith, My first thought was of the Simi Valley Area, except for the scale of the rock(singular) and the lake(singular(?) as the 'lakes' are all the same cube?), where I went on a field trip once and learned about something totally unrelated called semi quasi wad (I guess you had to have been there). Any rate the Idea of a train set is appealing. That would make a nice animation if you could keep the render times down. - TJ

I don't live to far from Simi Valley. (California) About an hour drive? Something like that. Agentsmith

bikermouse, different angle, closer.

Different angle, closer still.

I thought about tree variation before I did this, but I didn't go far enough. What I did was to put my one tree in the middle, duplicate it four times and then proceeded to slightly change the sizes of each of the new trees (fat, skinny, tall short). I then selected all five trees and multi-replicated them 50 times each (250 trees). After 2D dispersing them, I then took a top view and selected any trees that fell off the terrains or into the water and deleted them. This was intentional as I wanted a thinner spread of trees over the terrains. I then, of course, lifted them all, dropped them onto the terrain, and then pushed down a little further. I'll re-do this scene and NEXT time...I will after re-sizing the trees, I'll also make each tree a different family color, that way I can choose "random" trees to make darker/lighter, etc. I'll also very slightly angle some. The trees as they are, still look too much the same and blend into the grasss a little too much. Maybe I'll use a pine-type of tree, make it more brown than green. AgenSmith

Agent Smith,

The contrast in color between the grass and the trees really doesn't look that bad, - the brightest of the leaves may be too bright of a green(?)

The different family idea is good - I wouldn't have thought of that.

Thanks for the views - in the second one the terrain looks like grey shale broken off of the outcropping. I like the Idea of 2d trees as they can look realistic in stills and are not as memory intensive as their 3d counterparts. When I had the Xfrog demo I think one 3d tree worked out to 25 megs.

Keep working with this idea - It looks like it will save a lot of setup time. (bloodsong says alot is not a word so I try not to say alot alot.)

• TJ