[Award Winner] Making Photo-realistic Trees in GIMP: A Mini-Tut

[arsheesh]

Hello All,

Been a while since my last post; alas, school has kept me busy. In making my map of Eriond a few people asked about the method I used to create my trees. I had used Ascencion's Atlas style tutorial (converted by Gidde into GIMP) to create the map, but had added some slight modifications of my own. One such modification was to use the clouds generated "Hills" layer instead as a "Trees" layer. One problem I found however, was that since these clouds were randomly generated, the resultant trees that they yielded also appeared in random shapes, and in random places within my map, causing me to have to erase unwanted trees, and cut and paste trees in the regions where I wanted them. This made me cranky. Not happy with the original method, I figured that there had to be an easier way. After casting about for a bit for inspiration for a new method, I came upon RobA's "Making Not so Random Coastlines in GIMP" tutorial. Thanks to Rob's brilliance, I got my new method, and here it is: not-so-random photorealistic trees in GIMP (see the .jpgs below for an example of what you should be able to get out of this tutorial).

Thanks to Ascension, Gidde and RobA for much of the inspiration of this method, and to Hohum for beta-testing it for me and providing me with helpful feedback.

EDIT: After two years of minor revisions, I have decided to rewrite an updated version of this tutorial. This updated tutorial now includes some custom patterns which you can find below. To install these, download the folder, unzip it, and save them to the patterns folder of GIMP. Then open or refresh GIMP and they should show up in the patterns dialogue.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh