Ask the Experts / Foliage

Hey guys.

 

I wanted to get your feedback on foliage as it's never been one of my strong points. Most of the screens I've posted have received some constructive criticism on the foliage and I spent some time this weekend trying to improve it.

 

In order to do this I looked at the foliage in a lot of the recent accolade winning parks and designs and tried to emulate some of what I saw. I also read through some older topics about it for some tips.

 

The tips I kept seeing over and over are that I need to clump trees together and only use a few different tree types. 

 

After reading these discussions and looking at some parks I used parkdat to bring in a few trees from the trees group in the Louis! bench. I started making my own trees out of those objects and tried to mix those trees with other trees that they belonged with (a lot of which was based on the parks I downloaded).

 

I'm pretty happy with the results, but I'm interested to hear what you think before I go through the whole park and use similar methods to fix the foliage. I'm really tired of sucking at foliage. lol

 

 

 

(this screen is cut off but the trees do branch off in clumps).

 

Oh... and the road is supposed to be a parkway, similar to those found in New York state and in other mountainous areas of the country. This is why the road lacks shoulders. I felt that an interstate style highway would overpower the landscape too much.

The stem doesn't look that good.

And the leaves should cover the stem more in my opinion.

Looks pretty close to a parkway situation; I'd suggest filling in juuust a little more as you move further away from the road.  Since the road is the focus, leaving blank patches of ground or high-contrast tree trunks farther away is an unneeded distraction for viewers.

I'd do more clusters, make them denser, worry less about the large trees, maybe take a few of them out, and put more thought and variation into the underbrush, the landscaping and texture beneath the foliage.

Its not bad, but I'm with inthemanual...more underbrush and clumps/clusters. One thing I do to make underbrush look more dense and more like underbrush in general is to use the pine tree fence object in between bushes for a thicker look. I'd give that a shot here as well, although in my experience, it looks best in NCSO situations.  

Thanks so much for the feedback guys.

 

I deleted a few trees (though I'm happy with the density for the most part unless people think it's really off in which case I'll re-think it). I also added 2 new objects and added to the underbrush. Is this any better?

 

 

It's still very random, both on positioning of trees and the selection of trees you've chosen. Take more care and consideration into what types of trees work best together.

 

Also, don't randomly place bushes under the trees. Yes undergrowth is important, but its important to get the trees right first.

 

When it comes to undergrowth, I find using the 1k half bushes & mkx foliage the best. Using large bushes looks odd and using these smaller pieces of foliage correctly gives a more refined look.

Thanks for taking the time to respond Louis. I know you're the resident foliage expert so it's much appreciated.

 

I'm lucky to have a piece of land that's really just going to be grass and trees up near the parkway to play around in. Once I get this right I'm planning on carrying the new style of foliage throughout the park (except in the African jungle style area which is obviously a completely different thing). Everyone seems to be giving me the same feedback about the foliage really detracting from the park so I really want to fix it and appreciate all the feedback everyone has given me.