Attached Link: http://www.gardenhose.com

To kick off the release of our newest product, Tree Forestry, we've posted some new tree texture for anyone that's interested.

Most of the trees were created using Tree Forestry, or Forestry and Jungle 3D together. They've been reduced to 750 pixels for faster downloading, but give you an idea of potential.

The bare tree is departure for most tree textures and should provide interesting results. A blossoming tree, a eucapyptus, birch, sycamore and two firs are included as well.

All of the files have an alpha mask and are flattened .psd. The textures page is linked below the Tree Forestry banner as Tree Textures.

Have fun, and please link us if you display a render using one of the trees.

Dennis@DigArts

Thank you for the info. I'll check them out soon. Can't ever have enough tree stuff, you know. :) One thing though: Vue won't use .psd files. That's a Photoshop native format, right?

Didn't know that. We have a earlier version, but never installed it.

I'm aware the Vue does trees, though they likely look different from ours. As you say, you can never have enough and mixing looks is good sometimes.

I assume Vue does allow 2D texture mapping, and with alpha based transparency. If so, most image editors will open PSD and recognize the mask channel. You can then save as tif, or whatever ever format Vue recognizes as a texture.

Hope this helps.

Nice product to add on for...but I believe Tree Forestry is only for Painter 6 and 7. This was not specific in your post. In this case, those that do have Painter 6 and 7 but hardly use it but say use Corel Photo Paint more...its gonna cost again if a version of Forestry for Corel Photo Paint is gonna be release. This has happened to me in the past owning Garden Hose series which I started with the version for Painter a long time ago. I have to end up buying another version for Corel Photo Paint not aware at that time that it was to be "useable" by other Paint program. It be good taht Tree Forestry for all 2D Paint program be release at the same time if possible or at least, let us in the know that this is only for Painter 6 nd 7 currently.

Hmmm... Well, I have Painter 6, and I never noticed that it opens Photoshop files. I guess I should have figured that, but I never use anything other than jpg, bmp, gif, tga or tiff. Well, thanks for the info, DigArts and Bill. :) I'll have to look into this. Oh , and Vue most definitely does allow for 2D texture mapping. Does an outstanding job at it, for that matter, but only with UVW-mapped meshes. It's own native format will deal with 2D textures, but not as well, although the plants and tres in Vue will take an enormous variety of custom texture maps, if they're set up right.

Well, I'll tell you this much.. I bought the tree forestry, and granted you gotta have painter 6 or 7, but it definitely rocks... It's so easy to make great trees... It's coincidental that this post is here, cause I've been playing with it tonite for a couple of hours... So yeah, I know that it's for a limited audience Bill, but it works real good.. :) I also have the Jungle 2d for photopaint and jungle 3d for painter, and those are great for leaves and flowers...

I did this in 3 minutes, and I don't know Painter well, and just got the Tree Forestry.. For quick and dirty, this is not bad... :)

That IS pretty cool!

I just ordered tree forestry but i have used before Jungle 3D for touch up some Vue renders with more detailled foliage in 'gros plan' using tonal setting for matching colors .With Painter ,this is an excellent product and i am sure tree forestry will be an good complement

Yeah, the way I see it, there are so many scenes where I see the trees in my head and the way they should go and inasmuch as the trees in Vue are great, there are just some things that they will never have, like wavyness to the trunk, holes, like above, super detail in the outer branches... And this thing makes it super easy to do all of the above... I mean, crack out of the box, you can start doing decent trees, and with some practice, I'm I know you can do fantastic trees, no matter what you see if your head... I plan to bring them in as alpha planes, so I know that he polygon count will be extremely low... :)

I just got back from the page, after downloading a few things that looked interesting. I have to say, that Jungle 2D for Painter looks pretty cool. It's definitely going on my "to get" list. :)

The jungle 3d is better cause it doesn't have shadows.. I think the 2d has shadows... Just something to think about...

I must say that all of DigArts product are very useful and good, shadows or no shadows. Before buying, what I'm saying here is that, each of its kind are similar....its a question of buying it for the paint grogram you use most in. For me, Corel Photo Paint does all my post work and certainly, I would love to have Tree Forestry for Photo Paint. Also, depending on what you want to do with these product, they are sorta like "nozzle" spray in someway...take some time in getting use to and applying them correctly do take sometime.

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.

Okay, all this talk of sandwiches has made me hungry! LOL! Seriously, thanks Dig, for an awesome introduction to the techniques behind the products. :)

Hi Dennis..."As for a Photopaint version of Tree Forestry, maybe in the future."...very soon I hope. I have always thought that Photo Shop and Photo Paint were the two up front most use 2D Paint Program. I suppose Digarts find Painter more popular...is that so. I only use Painetr when I need to mimic oil, water colour etc...this area of brush effect, personally I feel Painter score the highest.

You should be able to open a .psd file in PaintShop Pro or Painter without any problem and them make it a targa file or anything you want :0). Laurie

I know Laure...just too 'much' extra work...me lazy bump :) Anyhow, you have to consider the image gamma and colouration. Your monitor can only be really be 'accurate' with one paint program though all colour palette from all this program uses the same format. Try loading an image created from Photo Paint or Photo Shop and load it into Paint and you know what I mean...or may be its my monitor....LOL!

Nah, there's definitely a difference Bill... I do that all the time, load images from Photopaint into Photoshop and the colors look different... Or maybe we both use the same monitor... :)