Populating a terrain with trees

[Andrew March]

Okay, so I've got my trees populating an area but they are all just in one big square, how can I get them to spread out across a terrain?

[jaf]

Lot's of ways to position and size your population.  I'll start out with a few simple suggestions and let the pro's add to it (or correct me.)

I find going to the top view in the preview wind, right clicking the preview and selecting "select object or shader" and then your population, is a good start.  You will probably have to use the navigation zoom to see your population and hopefully a recognizable part of your terrain.

Now you can see how much and where your population is relative to the terrain.  You can use the x and z arrows to position it and in your object panel, you can select an area rotation and sizes.

[Andrew March]

Yep, got that bit figured out, the problem seems to be that it just produces a square of say trees, is there any way to get the population to follow the contours of my terrain or to paint a population similar to painting an eco-system in Vue?

[gregsandor]

You can use a black and white mask to restrict the population within it's area.

You have an object and a populator.  Make sure it references your planet and Compute Terrain node.  Set the population size, then add an image map shader and set its coverage to the same size.   Plug it in to the population density of the populator.  That's it.

You can also use a Surface Layer plugged in there, and instead of or in addition to your BW mask, restrict it by terrain slope or altitude.  You can also use a painted shader as a mask that you can edit on the terrain.   I suggest you try the first most simple way, then get more fancy once you figure out the basic method.

[cyphyr]

take a look at the "use density shader" at the bottom of the first tab in the population shader.
Here you can plug in a distribution shader/surface layer is similar (based on slope and elevation), a power fractal (populates where white is, not where black is), an image map shader (import an image created elsewhere) or a painter shader (roughly the same as vues) or of course you could use these in any combination.
Hope this helps
Richard

[Andrew March]

Outstanding,

Starting to get the hang of this and should have something to show for it by tomorrow.

Thanks all