Tutorials

The Forest Modeller plugin

by Morten Moen

The Forest plugin for Lightwave Modeller makes distant forest objects that follow the topography of the landscape.  Trees are not planted on steep surfaces or under the water line.
Forest is run from the Custom menu under the Objects tab in Modeller.  Put the landscape object in a background layer and select the forground layer where you want the resulting forest object.  The plugin also needs to have one empty layer in addition to one background and one foreground layer.

Plugin interface

The plugin interface contains the following parameters: 

Steep angle: Trees will not be planted on surfaces steeper than this angle (in degrees). 

Shoreline: Trees will not be planted below this height.  Use this when the landscape has a waterline and you do not want underwater trees.

Subdivide level: If this parameter is set to 0, one tree will be planted at each point in the landscape geometry.  If this makes the distance between trees too large, set the subdivide level  to 1 or higher.  This will subdivide the landscape before using the points to plant trees.  The plugin uses the standard Subdivide Flat command to do this.  Note that subdividing may take a long time. 

Plant low poly trees: If this parameter is selected, simple trees will be planted.  These trees are actually 3-sided cones.  Used with a proper clip map this will be ok for distant forests.  If this parameter is not selected, the result of running the plugin is a geometry of points where the trees should have been.  There are no points below the water line, and the steep surfaces have been removed.  Use this with LW-Point-Clone+ in the Tools-Custom menu to plant your own trees. 

Tree height: The height of the low poly trees. 

Tree radius: The radius of the low poly trees.
 

Eksample

I have made an island and surfaced it with a rock texture and some green LW_Snow for grass.  Without trees it looks like this: 

This is what I did to put trees on it:

  1. Open Modeller and load the island into layer 1.
  2. Select layer 2 as the FG layer and layer 1 as the BG layer.
  3. Select Forest from the Objects-Custom menu.
  4. Set Steep angle to 45, Shore line to 0, Sudivide to 0, select 'Plant low poly trees', set Tree height to 7 and Tree radius to 0.5.
  5. Click OK.
  6. Layer 2 will now contain a set of 3-sided cones.  Give them a surface called trees or something and save.
  7. Bring both the island and the trees into Layout.  It may be wise to parent the trees to the island in case you will be moving the island around.
  8. Open the objects panel for the trees and give them the following Clip Map with a size of 0.3 m, 2 m, 0.3 m:

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  9. Set up some lights and render


 

Problems and future enhancements

The trees now all have the same height.  A future version will make it possible to vary the height of the trees.  If this is a problem right now, unselect the 'Plant low poly trees' parameter and plant your trees yourself using LW-Point-Clone+ plugin. 

Another problem is that the trees will tend to stand in rows.  Later versions may introduce some jittering to solve this.  This can also be solved by planting the trees yourself as you will be able to use the Jitter tool on the points before planting on them.