Put quite simply, how do I go about it?

I've tried making trees singly, before now, but I always run into memory 
issues when loading them.  For my current project, I need not one, but a 
  whole bunch of trees.  Preferably, a moderately dense Deciduous forest.

So I was wondering if there was a way to fill a large area with trees. 
Ideally it would be nice to have them conform to a landscape as well, 
but I try not to be greedy.

Any suggestions would be helpful.


A.D.B.

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You go about it by creating a mesh the represents the
tree. You can then use POV-Ray to copy the mesh
all over the scene without setting your computer on fire.

Stefan


"Anthony D. Baye" <Sha### [at] hotmailcom> skrev i meddelandet 
news:4346d3e4@news.povray.org...
> Put quite simply, how do I go about it?
>
> I've tried making trees singly, before now, but I always run into memory 
> issues when loading them.  For my current project, I need not one, but a 
> whole bunch of trees.  Preferably, a moderately dense Deciduous forest.
>
> So I was wondering if there was a way to fill a large area with trees. 
> Ideally it would be nice to have them conform to a landscape as well, but 
> I try not to be greedy.
>
> Any suggestions would be helpful.
>
>
> A.D.B.

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> Any suggestions would be helpful.

For one, try Arbaro to generate just a handful of mesh2-trees:

http://arbaro.sourceforge.net/

Then (shameless plug, I know) you might want to have a look at my
Surcoat-Macros to automate the placement of the trees.

http://www.nolights.de/download.html#surcoat

But, if you want to do it yourself, you could simply use trace() to sample a
heightfield and thus gather positions for your trees, though you'd have to
take care not to place them too closely.

Mesh2-objects are only saved once to the memory, and then instanced,
requiring just a few dozens bytes to place the same tree again. With a
handful of trees, rotated about the y-axis, it is virtually impossible to
tell them apart, unless they have obvious flaws (like a single, thick branch
or such).

There's also a thread that might be of interest to you:

http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/thread/%3C43236855%40news.povray.org%3E/?ttop=218917&toff=50

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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As stated above, try using only a few mesh2 trees as templates and place 
copies of it in a more or less random fashion.
There is another jave tool called PovTree (original derived fron Tom 
Aust's famous tree includes)
    http://propro.ru/go/Wshop/povtree/povtree.html

A typical workflow I could think of looks as follows:
- create a few trees
- create a hightfield which serve your needs
- create a (later non vivsible) pigment (eg. by bitmap) for the hightfield
   - the color channels in this pigment can be used as information for 
density of the trees, which tree to place, scaling or what ever you like
- write a macro which traces the heightfield in an random fashion
   - for a given point on the heightfield eval_pigment and use the 
colors to decide if to place a tree, scale or what ever you can imagine of

you should end up with the crude geometrical setup for your scene, which 
is normaly the easiest part. The realy hard thing IMO is to find a nice 
view, setup lightning, texture the whole stuff and add some eye-candy, 
which takes much longer.

... dave

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