Vegetation

This map is quite boring, because it has no features. Let's add some trees. So press Escape to exit ingame mode and click on the terrain tab on the RollupBar, and then click on the Vegetation button. Now click on the 'add vegetation category button' (It's on the same row as the icons with trees on them), and call it 'trees'. Now select your new category and click the 'add vegetation object' icon (the one with a single tree on it). Now click on the 'natural' icon on the side of the open dialogue, then navigate to trees > palm_tree. Select palm_tree_large_e.cgf, and open it.



Now click on the palm_tree_large_e in the objects view, and Shift+Click in the perspective view to place a single tree.



Placing trees one by one is very time consuming though, so move the brush radius slider to the right, click on the 'paint objects' button and start painting some trees.



But this style of tree placement is very uniform, isn't it? We want more natural looking trees. So let's take a look at the RollupBar, under the objects view. You should see a list of variables for your selected vegetation object. Size is the size of the tree - 1 is normal. SizeVar is the size variation. The random rotation checkbox does just that - has the trees face a random direction. Bending is how the trees sway (bend) - 0 is no swaying and 1 is maximum. Density is how dense the trees are placed - the value represents the distance between each tree. And finally, the Align to Terrain checkbox aligns the trees to the terrain, such as hills to achieve a more natural look. Play with these settings to see what you get. You might want to set CastShadow to true as well, so the trees you place cast shadows. Feel free to explore and see how many other vegetation objects you can add. Here are my final settings: