If this
palette is closed you can open it by selecting "Tree Designer" in the
Window menu.
Use this
palette to generate the tree of your choice. You can always
select Undo from the Edit menu,
or click Stop in the View palette if
the tree is taking too long to draw.
A new randomly
generated tree is created and replaces the current tree.
The species, textures and wind remain the same. You can go back to the
previous tree by selecting Undo in the Edit menu.
Shadow check box
Click to add or
remove a shadow.
When selected a
shadow of the tree is drawn on the ground. The size and
shape of the shadow depends upon the time of day.
Clicking in this
box switches the trees shadow on and off. Shadows are
never drawn when using wire rendering and they are always drawn when
using shadow only rendering. The rendering types are selectable using
the Render quality menu in the Tree Designer palette.
You can select
trees of various types through this menu. A new tree
replaces the current tree. If you don't like the tree you get, try
clicking the New tree button
above.
There are four
categories of tree: Conifer, Broadleaf, Palm and Fantasy. The Conifer,
Broadleaf and Palm trees are also listed in the Real Trees A-Z menu.
Some of these trees have more than one name so they are listed more
than once in the A-Z list.
Age
menu
Use this menu to
choose the age of the tree.
Trees come in
five different ages: Sapling, Child, Adolescent, Adult
and Ancestor. The youngest being Sapling and the oldest being Ancestor.
An adult tree that has been dead for a while may also be generated.
As the age of
the tree increases, the size and the number of branches
generally increases. Ancestor trees can have a very large number of
branches and therefore take a while for the computer to draw. In the
natural world, trees grow at different rates so the ages given here are
very approximate and are used only as a guide.
Season menu
Use this menu to
select the season.
In nature
evergreen species keep their leaves all year round. The
winters are so harsh in Little Stick, that no trees have leaves in
winter. In spring you can get fruit or blossom. In autumn leaves turn
red and brown. Trees are the happiest in summer.
Set the Wind
Wind speed slider
Move the slider
to set the wind speed.
Wind has a
different effect upon different trees. Elastic trees wave
about while thick trunks hardly move. In Little Stick the roots are
very strong.
Wind direction compass
Move the needle
to set the direction that the wind blows in.
You can set the
horizontal direction that the wind blows towards by
moving the compass needle to point that way.
If the needle
points East, the wind blows from the West to the East.
Weather forecasters would call this a Westerly wind because it blows
from the West.
Wind vertical slider
Move the slider
to set the wind to blow upwards, horizontal or
downwards.
You can set the
vertical direction that the wind blows towards.
Although most trees in nature are blown horizontally, that may not be
the case in computer animation.
Render Options
Time of day menu
Use this menu to
select the time of day.
At dawn the sun
is low. Shadows grow shorter until noon and then
longer again. At dusk the shadow is the other side of the tree. Shadows
can also be modified using the Shadow options palette.
Render quality menu
Use this menu to
select the render quality.
If the tree
takes a long time to draw it may help to render the tree at
a lower quality. Lower quality and younger trees use less memory and
are quicker to build. You can try using medium quality and switching
off shadows using the Shadow check box
in the Tree Designer palette.
Colour buttons
Click on one of
the colour buttons to change the background, wood,
leaf, fruit or blossom to any colour.
For placing the
tree onto a photograph, a black background is the most
suitable. This ensures that no colour from the background remains in
the outline of the tree when it is pasted onto another picture.
The wood and
leaf colour buttons remove any texture used for the wood
or leaf and replaces it with a single colour and the default generated
texture. If
your graphics card isn't the latest whiz bang model, this may speed up
drawing.
Click to repeat
the wood texture or stretch it to fit the whole tree.
Textures may be
tiled along the length of the tree or stretched over the
whole tree. If your textures are small images then the tree looks
better if they are tiled. Using one big texture for the whole tree you
could change the colour of the branches as they get shorter.
Load textures buttons
Click on one of
these buttons to choose either the wood or leaf
textures.
Textures can be
imported from BMP, JPEG, PICT, Photoshop, PNG,
QuickTime Image, SGI, TIFF and TGA picture files. Very large textures
can slow the drawing if you have an old graphics card.
The alpha
channel is a grayscale image where each pixel is used as a
measure of transparency. You can therefore include lots of strange
shapes, including branches, by being creative with your leaf images.
The easiest way to add an alpha channel to a picture is to convert the
picture to TIFF format and add the alpha channel in your image editing
application such as Photoshop. Other formats such as JPEG do not
support alpha layers.
The alpha layer
is usually the 8 bit difference between 24 and 32 bit
colour.
Output
resolution
Output resolution boxes
Type the width
in pixels of new image or movie files into the left box
and the height into the right box.
When you save
your tree as a picture or movie, this number is the
number of pixels across the width and height of an image. On a typical
computer screen there may be 72 pixels in an inch and on paper there
may be 300 to 600 or more.
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