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Forest Trees

Eriol_Eandur

Head of Plugin Development
Staff member
Vala
Moderator
Supporter
Forest Update released! Yay!

I think now it's time to discuss forest trees!

Toti and the texturer team gave uns incredible possibilities. But we still have to develop styles and techniques to use them to build realistic trees. So here are my thoughts:

Trees are living plants! Trivial? Yes, but no! When looking at our exsiting forests at the MCME map this has not really been taken into account. Why do trees have leaves? They do photosynthesis to transform light energy into chemical energy. This means that it doesn't make any sense for a tree to grow leaves at spots with little light. Why is this important for us? It makes trees growing in a forest completely differntly shaped than solitary trees growing in the middle of some meadow.

Solitary Trees: They get light from all directions. The blue sky and white clouds scatter a lot of sunlight. Thus a solitary tree has leaves all around from top close to the ground with little differences in direction (north, south, west, east). Solitary trees usually have full closed canopies of small branches and leaves:

1700399408754.webp


Forest Trees: They compete with each other for light. Their only way to get more light is to grow higher than the other trees around. There is almost no light from the sides compared to light from the top. Thus forest trees have very long trunks or few stron steep branches with relatively small side branches and leaves except at the very top of the tree where most light is found:
1700399736398.webp


Yes, both pictures show beeches. They are trees of the same kind with completly different shapes!

Now when walking through a forest at the MCME map all trees I see are shaped like solitary trees. The small trees I made 2015 in Lothlorien are no exception :oops: and the new forest example at plotworld also consists of mostly solitary shaped trees:

1700400227255.webp

I really think we should start making realistic forest trees!

There are of course many different types of forests. There are forest close to villages which in history were economically used for growing construction wood, for feeding pigs and goats, for hunting and so on.... These forests typically had little undergrowth.
1700400728925.webp

And there are anchient woodlands far off any human settlements. These forests have abundant undergrowth, fallen and rotting trees, trees of all size:
1700401305922.webp

I think we should carefully plan where to build which type of forest (or which gradual mixture of both types). The Numenoreans were reknown to cultivate forests for shipbuilding surely in Gondor there is something left of this great past. But surely therea are also inaccessible ancient woodlands in Gondor's mountain valleys and steep hillsides.

When buiding a city, village or farmland we usually try to find some pictures inspiration for styles and think a lot about realism and credibility. We should give our forests the same attention!
 
Going to bump this thread for the newer faces in the tree building business, ahem @Thanx4Loot ahem. Sorry, bit of a cold.

Couldn't agree more with you though Eriol, and as the actual building of large scale forests gets nearer I have a few things I would like to add that I have been thinking about recently as well.

I think we need to work on some more fallen and decaying tree concepts, I think part of the reason this has not happened yet is the lack of a fallen tree texture (akin to the moss covered stone [polished_andesite_slab[type=double] with a log underneath]. But I invite people to harrass me or toti to add it since we are often distracted with other projects.

Especially in forests like the second image Eriol included I think it will be more important to spend time focusing on ground detailing than necessarily on achieving perfect smoothness. I know in the last 5 years we have gotten really good at smoothing since we have been left with nothing better to do while the forest pack is made. But now we have it, and honestly a lot of old growth forest floors are not smooth. This can be because of roots, tipped over trees, larger dirt mass around old tree trunks due to leaf fall etc, but in my opinion having the forest floor soo smooth kills a bit of the chaos of one of these dense forests.

Also gib me gopher, mole and fox holes :p

1719702019376.webp

And also the inclusion in addition to the larger more macro scaled cliffs we tend to build, smaller more standalone crop outs of rocks which can make the forest floor more interesting.

1719702925430.webp



Another thing I think is important to keep in mind is that although we are very proud of our tree textures and want to show them off, a lot of areas ought to have some pretty heavy undergrowth, using leaf blocks which may limit accessibility. I've yet to see a really great dense undergrowth concept so this is something I've been thinking about as well.

1719702127844.webp


Also I wanna see someone make a concept with proper snags and broken off trees. Generally I suppose I want to see some more messy overgrown and less manicured forests than the ones I have seen pop up on the server so far with the new pack.

TLDR: Less emphasis on trees, More emphasis on forest
 
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