2008 Sep. 22

Posted by Marko under section Map Making
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Adding vegetation to the terrain

Adding vegetation is very simple with Sandbox2.

 

Open the Rollup Bar once again, in the terrain section and click on the Vegetation button. Click on the little green tree highlighted in red on the screenshot you see on the right to pick a tree model. Take any palm tree model from the list. It will add to youe Objects lists meaning you will be able to grab it back very quickly by clicking on the model you want in your list. You can use the Paint Objects button when you have a model selected to toggle the tree planting on / off.

Using vegetation like this will improve your map quality. You have to be aware though that you can greatly improve the look of your tree by using the settings in the lower part of the Vegetation menu :

  • put a value in SizeVar to randomly alter the size of your tree and check the RandomRotation box to randomly rotate them. This avoids having an ugly look if you make a dense forest with the same tree (Sizevar values between 0.3 and 0.7 looked good)
  • check the AligntoTerrain box to avoid having weird effects. This ensures your tree is "planted" into the land and not slightly hovering above.
  • check the UseTerrainColor box to have a smooth colour transition between your tree foot and the land it is resting on. This switch dosen't always work correctly.
  • check the CastShadow and ReceiveShadow boxes to force your trees to cast shadows on the other objects and to draw shadows casted from other objects on them
  • if you are on a large scale landscape (not narrow but opened and visible from far away) check the UseSprites box to force the engine to replace the tree model with a sprite (improves in game performance)

Using exactly the same technique, you can plant many other things than tress (broken wood, rocks...). When you want to use grass, respect the 2 following rules for better "cosmetics"

  • Always unckeck the CastShadow checkbox on grass. It will make you loose performance and not have a high added value (grass shadows are hardly noticeable)
  • Uncheck the UseSprites checkbox. Grass will look akward from a little distance if you replace it with a sprite

 

If you stick to these rules, you will quickly get a nice looking vegetation in your map as on the screenshot below :