I’ve continued my attempt to round up some interested artists from my groups of friends, but with no luck. I still have the original few who claim they are interested, but that really means nothing. I even got a fairly harsh rebuff from one friend essentially telling me to stop asking and to get new friends. Sigh.
In light of this, I thought it might be a good time to break out blender and learn how to use it. A couple years ago I made some extremely simple (crappy) ships for a Freelancer mod, but other than that I have no experience with any kind of digital art. Still, I fired it up and played around a bit, and it was good. Then vista decided it was time to restart for an update, and when I came back, blender no longer worked. Apparently this is a semi-common vista issue — after restarting, blender doesn’t work anymore. Re-installing blender doesn’t help; but re-installing your video drivers apparently can. It doesn’t fix the issue, but it does let you use blender until you restart again. Just so we are all clear, this is insane. I absolutely hate vista, but I don’t want to go through the pain in the butt of a format. We are quickly approaching the final straw though — one of these days I’ll be back on an OS that sort of works (XP), which is a big upgrade from barely works (vista).
ANYhoo, after the blender thing, my mind went in a different direction. My hand-drawing skills are absolutely worthless, AND I need a bunch of ‘doodad’ sprites like trees, bushes, rocks, etc to spread around the map. I definitely can’t draw them, and if I ever do get someone doing art, I don’t want to waste/annoy them with meaningless terrain. So, in the spirit of the already procedurally generated world, I’ve started a little tool to create tree sprites. So far it isn’t great — I need to tweak a lot and add a bunch of features, but it is kind of nifty.
Right now it can’t really do anything but attempt a simple tree. I’ll be adding in a bunch of tools to tweak each tree on the fly so I can get exactly what I want out of it, including all the random constraints, colors, etc. I’m also going to add a season toggle to change the colors of the leaves, and maybe add a way to create fruit trees too. If I feel like getting really fancy, I’ll see what I can do about adding snow to the top in a way that looks good.
For now, here are some sample trees and a short video of what it looks like jumping through the different random number generator seeds.
