Duration: 15:26

999 views

16

https://www.patreon.com/ulillillia --- Published on Jun 24, 2014

Thanks to Arbaro, I now have a way to generate high quality trees. Unfortunately, Arbaro completely lacks the ability to automatically generate a large number of trees in one go so, for now, I'm stuck having to manually process each tree. This video shows not only how the trees actually look in Platform Masters, but how I manually go through the process to create them. If anyone has any experience with Java programming, I would appreciate it if you would update Arbaro (an open source Java program) to include a way to automate the generation of the trees. This is my process:

1. Start up Arbaro and open the data for the tree species I want (if neither are already open).
2. Go to setup then change the seed to what I'm currently working on for the current world, layer, and tree ID number within that layer.
3. Click on the gray tree icon on the far left and click "start" then wait for Arbaro to generate the tree.
4. Open POV-Ray (if not already open).
5. Update the scene file data to reflect the species and that seed that I set.
6. Set the resolution I need (based on the Z position in PM's environment) then click on "run" and let POV-Ray render the tree.
7. Start up GIMP (if not already open) and open that file.
8. Autocrop the image then save it as a PNG under a new name.
9. Repeat steps 2 through 8 for any additional trees.

Notice how there's a lot of manual input required for this. For automation to work, Arbaro has to be updated to include 4 critical features (as I'm envisioning it):

1. There must be a check box for "autoincrement seed" that simply adds 1 to the seed value for each run.
2. Another tree icon is needed for having multiple trees be rendered in bulk. Perhaps this could be in the "export" area, just with a few new things added.
3. Under this area, I need to select the scene file to use, the one I've already created. The scene file does not get modified, only read. If needed, the scene file can be copied exactly as is under another file name.
4. A "quantity" field is needed, to set how many trees to generate and render in one go.
5. When Arbaro generates the tree through automation, the INC (include) file cannot contain the seed number or only 1 tree will ever render.
6. The output image file that is saved should be "%s%1d.png" with a transparent background. The %s is the tree species. The %1d is the seed number.

Once Arbaro can generate trees in bulk, a must for worlds like Keveran Forest where several thousand trees are needed, I can seriously save a ton of time, a few months even. Updating Arbaro to do this shouldn't take long for someone that knows Java and, since the program is open source, easily modifiable by anyone.

By the way: once I finish the first 5 worlds, I plan on recording a video showing the trees in the game engine, beyond what these screenshots have.