I began to play around with implementing trees in Iktsua today. I started with the basic tree model from the talented JerIn3D. I created a couple of the trees randomly spaced in a forest biome.

TREE1The trees were a bit boring, so I varied the heights and rotations.

TREE2The trees looked really close together so  I tried to space them out.

TREE3Things started to look better (to my programmer’s eye), but I noticed something while walking through the trees, they were all sort of uniformly spaced and sized. The random was too random, you could tell what I was doing. You can see that the trees are all close in size and spaced evenly apart:

TREE5_badI tried to think about how trees actually worked, and I have no idea if I am right, but I thought maybe the larger trees could have some smaller trees clumped near their base. Perhaps the larger tree dropped some seeds and the saplings grew up near it? Anyway, I tried making the tallest trees have a couple of smaller trees clumped around their base, the result looks a lot more organic to me:

TREE4

 

And the final result in game:

TREE6

Let us know what you think about anything (the models, the colors, the programming, the biome logic)! I would be especially interested in your ideas about how to make the forests look realistic and interesting while still randomly generating them.

 

-Zach (iamscissors) 

 

 

As always, any support you can offer (either monetary or by simply playing our game) is greatly appreciated!