Background trees

[Rita]

Hello everyone!

Could you please tell me how to create a forest of flat trees on the background?

[Agame78]

Hello! I made some just a few days ago like this:

-create a plane and resize it. 15 for Y and 60 for X was good for me.

-then just add a texture on it, you can find the path just looking on what the normal trees use.

-and there you have a few trees, keep duplicating the plane to make larger groups, put them behind of each other and so on. Set the clip distance to at least 800-1000.

Maybe theres a better way to do it, i'm currently working on my second map ever and still figuring out things on my own.

In the image: normal trees and 2d "faketrees" using the same texture.

[WrinkleysRule]

Unfortunately that method only works properly in FS22 (which is what you are doing  with GE 9.0.6).

The background tree set up in FS25 is totally different, as it uses a different shader (backgroundTreesShader.xml) for the seasonal and leaf growth effects.

[Rita]

Guys, I understand the background is just a decoration, 👻 but maybe someone could write a little script that would take the LODs of the trees🌲 and a PNG file with the planting locations marked, and create a forest. Similar to how we create a forest on a map. Maybe we could temporarily convert the background to a rigid body or so. I just don't know how to write anything in lua yet. 🤷‍♂️

I know a polite word PLEASE! ❤️😄

[Agame78]

10 hours ago, WrinkleysRule said:

Unfortunately that method only works properly in FS22 (which is what you are doing  with GE 9.0.6).

The background tree set up in FS25 is totally different, as it uses a different shader (backgroundTreesShader.xml) for the seasonal and leaf growth effects.

Yes, i'm working on FS22. It uses a shader called treeBillboardShader.xml which does the same trick i believe (?) (Im using spruces which do not drop their leaves so i ignored the shader.)

Now I added it to my trees and noticed that it makes the plane rotate towards you as you move so the trees wont become invisible from certain angle.

[Rita]

Well, to be honest, I don't need any seasonal changes. I want to create a taiga, and it's mostly spruce and pine trees. 😀 And the rest of the trees can be green, too; no one even notices them. As long as they're there. Right now, I only have board trees, and then an ice rink. 😂

[WrinkleysRule]

You could simply just use the ingame trees LOD1 and place that on the border.

 

[Rita]

Yes, but I need thousands of them.

I tried to use sets of background trees from the standard maps, but they don't suit my hills at all. 😄 And they cause collision errors. 

I don't know, maybe it's possible to somehow make the background part of terrain and then draw a forest on it using mesh paint mode or some other method? 🤔

[WrinkleysRule]

That number of trees will probably cause perfomance issues. what you could do to minimise the number of trees is use the treescape images used in some maps (Calmsden for example) for the furthest trees and LOD1 trees for the nearest.

Or create your own treescape images.

Out of curiosity how have you created your backround mesh ??

 

 

 

[Rita]

That's it, the forest is already growing in the background. 😆 I came up with the following:

1. I created a 4x4 auxiliary map with the same landscape.

2. I imported various tree LOD1s from the game.

3. Using terrain mesh paint mode, I painted a dense forest outside the 2x2 square, using these "tree stubs"  .

4. I exported this group of trees to the main map folder.

5. I opened the main map and imported this group.

6. The forest grew in the background of the map. The map doesn't count these stubs as trees. And it added only 1 MB to the map.

In two strokes of the brush with a radius of 500 the forest is ready. 🤣

 

Thanks to everyone who tried to help. 

[WrinkleysRule]

Well done, that is a good method providing your background is 4k x4k.

In maps created using the maps4fs programme the background is 6k x 6k which means you cannot create a terrain in another map so you would need to edit the FULL.png in the background folder down to a 4096 x 4096 size.

Simple resizing will not work as the terrain would be compressed (slopes would be steeper) so one method would be to open the FULLl.png in an image editor, create a new image of 4096 x 4096 and paste that into the FULL.png.

and crop the FULL.png to the 4096 x 4096 size and save this as your dem in your auxillary map.

 

 

[Rita]

First, I created a 2x2 map, and then an additional 4x4 one for the forest. Both  in maps4fs. The background forest only grows in a 512-wide strip from the main map; beyond that, it will still appear as dots on the horizon. So everything looks more or less decent.

Although I would have made the background higher resolution and darker. I can't change the resolution—I don't have satellites now 😆, so I'll try to darken it later.