Day 15 – Finishing up the Forest

At the end of “Day 14 – Getting trees in the right places” I saved the (hopefully) finished ‘DeciduousMap’ image to my Caesar Creek ‘Working’ folder.  Today’s task is to go through the last two parts of the CST guide to actually get the forest areas into the scenery.  This is a pretty interesting step to me, because I’m not at all sure how this tree business works for sceneries.  I have heard other scenery designers talking about tree design as if it is a separate activity, but I don’t see anything in the CST documentation or in the videos I have studied.   Anyway, I plan to follow the bouncing ball and see where it leads! ;-).

On a separate, but related note; During the creation of the forest map images, the CST said to save ‘Map.psd’ to the desktop as an intermediate step.  However, I never saw anything about deleting these (temporary?) files once the DeciduousMap.bmp and ConiferousMap.bmp files were finished and saved in the ForestMaps folder – what gives there?

Part C – Exporting forest tiles to Terragen and Condor
Step 1:
Open CSTLandscapeEditor and select your landscape from the box menu.

Before doing this step, I renamed my current ‘DeciduousMap.bmp’ file to ‘CopyOfDeciduousMap.bmp’ so I can hopefully recover from any screwups, and then copied my current ‘130128_DeciduousMapNoWaterCities.bmp’ to ‘DeciduousMap.bmp’ (when dealing with software paranoia is just good common sense) and only then did I perform this step.  I launched Landscape Editor (LE) and selected my Caesar Creek scenery.  This time the ‘Loading Textures’ progress bar seemed to last a bit longer, so maybe that’s a good sign.  When the landscape was finally visible, I didn’t see anything different from what I had after my initial foray into surface coloring (see ‘Day 11- Green Everywhere!’) – bummer.  Then I tried checking the ‘Forest Maps’ menu item on the left side of the LE window, and voila – forest areas (or at least what I *hope* are forest areas) showed up in a different shade of green, as shown.  Actually I’m not quite sure whether the light-green splotches are forest areas or ‘no-tree’ zones, but either way its progress!  Oh, wait a minute – I think I get the idea – maybe the light-green (sort of lime green shade) areas are deciduous trees, and coniferous trees (of which I have none) would be shown in dark green, same as the color of the corresponding icon on the left side of the LE screen?
Step 2:
Select Forest maps tool and correct any forest areas near airports, water or surfaces etc. (Left Click places trees, right click removes trees)

OK, I finally figured this part out – but I’m not sure how useful it is without some idea of the positions of lakes, rivers, roads, runways, etc.  Since none of that is visible in the LE screen, I’m kinda dead in the water here…
Step 3:
Save the Landscape, this saves the corrected forest maps if they are modified with the CSTLandscapeEditor.

Skipped this step, as I didn’t make any modifications (or at least not any intelligent ones)
Step 4:
The forest maps now need to be exported for Condor by selecting File->Export forest map.

Did this.  Got a ‘Computing forest map’ progress bar that lasted for a minute or so.  When it completed, I got a message saying the completed forest map was saved to ‘C:\Program Files\Condor\Landscapes\CaesarCreek\CaesarCreek.for’
Part D – Generating textures with Terragen
Step 1:
Copy the sopack.tgp file into Terragen installation directory, (this is a plugin for Terragen).

I found this file in the ‘C:\Program Files\Terragen\Plugins’ folder, so hopefully it is already in the right place
Step 2:
Open Terragen and open TerragenCondor.tgw world file.
Terragen should now ask you to open a bitmap, choose Total overlay, and leave the rest the same and then click OK.

Hmm, I don’t remember seeing this file, so I did a search of my C:\ drive for ‘TerragenCondor.tgw’, and found it in the ‘C:\Program Files\Condor\CondorSceneryToolkit\GenericFiles\Terragen’ folder.  Opened it in LE as directed, only to see that we’re back to that generic world file with all the layer names in the original Slovenian.  Oh well, I’ve already been incorporated into the PhotoShop borg, so what’s one more indignity?  Hmm, I didn’t get a message asking about opening a bitmap, either….
Step 3:
Choose the desired coniferous tile example :
\Landscapes\yourLandscape\Working\Terragen\ConiferousTile_XXYY and then click OK.

Skipped this step

Repeat the above steps for the Deciduous tile.

FAIL!!  Can’t find anything that looks like ‘DeciduousTile_XXYY’ In my CaesarCreek\Working\Terragen folder – bummer.  So, where did these files come from in the first place?  I don’t think I generated anything like that in any of the previous steps having to do with forests and/or trees, so what’s the deal?  Did a disk search for all files with ’tile’ in the name… Got lots of hits, but nothing related to Condor sceneries in general or my Caesar Creek scenery in particular.  Time to buy another clue from David Regula?

So, as usual, I threw myself on the mercy of the Condor scenery design community and posted my difficulties on the forum.  About 1 minute after posting (literally – not joking here!) I got a reply from ‘Arneh’ who said (and I quote).

I’ve never used terragen for scenery creation myself, but I’m guessing you can generate those files from the Scenery Toolkit by running from the menu: “Tools -> Export forest maps to Terragen files“.

Sure enough – when I looked at the ‘Tools’ menu, there in all its glory is an option to ‘Export forest maps to Terragen tiles’.  Yikes, how could I have possibly missed that?  Well, in my defense I was following the CST instructions, which didn’t mention anything about this option, and it appears that a fair number of us lesser mortals have fallen into the same crack.  Performing the ‘Export forest maps to Terragen Tiles’ operation did the trick – now I have 110 DeciduousTile_XXYY.bmp files and a similar number of ConiferousTile_XXYY.bmp ones.  Interestingly, the Coniferous tiles were created even though I didn’t set anything up for Coniferous distribution, and the tile files themselves are blank (white).  Why white I’m not sure, as I thought that color was the ‘trees grow’ color – its a mystery ;-).

Landscape Editor showing 'Export forest maps to Terragen tiles' menu item

Landscape Editor showing ‘Export forest maps to Terragen tiles’ menu item

Landscape Editor after exporting forest maps to Terragen tiles

Landscape Editor after exporting forest maps to Terragen tiles

 

Step 4:
Open the correct terrain tile with Open button in Landscape dialog box.
Render as usual, there should now be dark forest areas in the rendered image, the output is the final result from Terragen, only fields will be added later, but not with Terragen.

OK, after getting past the above hurdle, now I’m ready to render.  I launched Terragen and opened the ‘CondorTerragen.tgw’ World file.  Unfortunately, I still don’t get a prompt to open a bitmap file as described in the CST manual, and I can’t find any way to do that manually in Terragen.  Oh well, back to the Condor Scenery forum…

 

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