A question about object placement and render settings.

[Profane]

Hello all. Hope you are doing great.

A few questions have been storming my mind lately and i haven't found the answers anywhere.
Probably cause of my grammar.. (not a native speaker here)
So hope you'll understand !

1. Object placement.
I know a lot how to limit where objects can go and whatnot, with maximum slopes and altitudes, all that.
But how can i place lots of trees in a pack of few around the landscape, just like in this picture:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/131928624@N04/23161687620/

Is it something i should use painted shader for ? Or is there a better way ?
Does it have something to do with object spacing / spacing variations ?

2. Render setting
In renderers tab, under the Extra tab, there is a slider called Detail blending.
I tried googling for answers, and i found one sentence of this setting and someone said that it was mainly for animations.
Do i get any benefit from it for a single render ? Or is it strictly just an animators tool ?

Thanks a bunch for anyone who takes the time to answer my questions  !

[Dune]

First of all,  I wouldn't worry about the detail blending, better leave it as is.

Second; you can use painted shader (in a top down view painting areas where you want your trees), or a power fractal with hard settings (high contrast, and play with slider to get the right amount of white 'dots'), and sizes the way you want the patches of trees. You can test the patches in an extra surface shader at the end of the line, using a test color and the mask input.

[Hannes]

Detail blending is only useful for animations, since it's blending between levels of detail as the distance between camera and surface changes (quoting Matt...).

[bobbystahr]

First of all,  I wouldn't worry about the detail blending, better leave it as is.

Second; you can use painted shader (in a top down view painting areas where you want your trees), or a power fractal with hard settings (high contrast, and play with slider to get the right amount of white 'dots'), and sizes the way you want the patches of trees. You can test the patches in an extra surface shader at the end of the line, using a test color and the mask input.

Y beat me to the punch Ulco...diff'rent timelines....