Tutorial: Working on Altitude-Based Ecosystems

Tip 2 – Plan the ecosystem

It’s sensible to plan out your ecosystem in advance. In that way you avoid wasting time modeling or sourcing things that later are not required. In this scene we’re going to keep it quite simple. Along the bottom of the lake bed we will add some seaweed, nearer the river banks we want some reeds. In fact, we’ll add two types of reeds, tall ones that are largely above water level and smaller ones that poke above the water line and add some interest. Moving up as we get near the river bank we want some stones and pebbles that will transition into grass weeds and finally trees, rocks, and flowers.

With a plan in place you can easily create a Forest Pack object for each of the distinct areas straight away.  Here’s a step-by-step example for creating the trees. 

1. Create a new Forest Pack object by setting the mode to Generate and picking the terrain cross-section object we created at the beginning of the tutorial.
2. Go to the Geometry rollout and open the Library. Select the objects you want to import. For this example we’ll pick a Black Pine and an American Elm model from the new tree library included in Forest Pack 6. Note that you can select and import multiple objects at once by holding down the CTRL button as you click them.
3. Adjust probabilities if necessary. In this example, we want fewer American Elms so the Probability setting for this model can be lowered to 20%.
4. Go to the Distribution rollout and choose a distribution pattern from the drop-down list. We used Patches 1, one of several new maps included in Forest Pack 6.
5. Adjust the Density values until you get the correct coverage of objects. In this case I’m using about 500m but it really depends on the scene and the objects being scattered so experimentation is a must. 

You should do the same thing for all the Forest Objects in your ecosystem plan. To save you from having to read a lot of unexciting repetition we’re not going to show the creation of everyForest Objects. Throughout this tutorial, we’ll explain a principle and allow you to apply it yourselves. If you’d like to know more about the fundamentals of Forest Pack we recommend first following the Canal tutorial which will get you up to speed quickly, before tackling this tutorial.

As you can see, at this stage we didn’t worry too much about any other settings, only the choice of models, their probabilities and distribution. If you use Forest Pack’s built-in presets, like the new Layered Grass for example, you can probably use the default settings. In fact the scene mostly uses objects from the Forest Pack 6 library. Only the reeds and flowers are from a third party. If you want to follow the tutorial you will need to supply your models for these areas, or you could substitute them with the canes and daisies that come with the plugin.

Tip 3 – Restrict objects using altitude min and max settings

With all of the Forest Objects created we can restrict them to the elevation range planned in the first tip. This is made possible using the Limit by Altitude feature found in the Surfaces rollout. Using a simple Bottom and Top value you can restrict the scatter to a specific elevation range. We’ll take this one Forest Object at a time from the bottom to the top, starting with the seaweed:

With those changes made you should have seaweed that is growing only on the bottom of the lake. Exactly the same technique is used to limit all the other Forest Pack objects used in this scene to create a complete ecosystem. 

iToo Software 

You can find the full guide here.