New plant request

[morcroft]

We are finally getting towards the point where we have a decent selection of resources suitable for use in the region generation. We are making use of all the generally available modders' resources we want, but we could really do with more plants unique to Elsweyr. Obviously all the usual rights remain with the modeller, but we'd like our Elsweyr to have its own flora.

Mostly we just need unobtrusive filler plants. I'm also trying to base new plants on real world species - some of the more fanciful creations just don't look real. Admittedly, nor do some real-world species but that's nature for you.

Dryland plants:

NO CACTI! Sorry, but I have a personal aversion: we're not doing Elsweyr as stereotype "desert".

We need small, succulent or other arid condition plants for the badlands and the scrub regions. We'll use aloe vera - but new aloes would be great, as would any plants with pale tough leaves.

Grassland plants:

We need suitable plants to intersperse with the grasses - and to give people something to look at if they've switched the grass off! We have wet grassland, dry grassland and cool high-altitude heath/moorland.

Rainforest plants:
Always good to have more biodiversity in the forests. These should either be low-light adapted for the forest floor (only 5% of sunlight makes it through to the ground) - or else they should be part of the "understory layer" between about head-height and maybe 20 feet (6m) up. I pretty much have the canopy sorted with existing (and planned) speedtrees.

I really want dead trees - both erect and fallen. These are common in the forest and will give us something to place epiphytes onto. I'd expect them to be mossy.

I'd also forest fruits like Papaya.

For the rainforest in particular we need to keep the polycount down for individual models as it needs to be pretty dense in there.

[The Old Ye Bard]

Rainforest:
Banana tree

Everywhere:
Chilli Plant

Steppes:
Centaurea salonitana

Badlands:
Tumbleweed (live/planted tumbleweed) (dead/mobile tumbleweed)

[Ja-Kha'jay]

I can go get some good textures for understorey plants, new zealand has a lot of biodiverity in the forests, from lancewood, to the five-finger plant, periperi, pitosporum, tree ferns, bush laywer and many many others. i remember once doing a species count on 9 square meters of bush, and come up with ~30 identifiable species, and many more that we had no expertise in. i'll see if i can drag my borther out to Mount Thomas, or Arthurs Pass so get some good snaps. also of moss and fallen trees, i'm working on a hanging licked which you can dangle of pretty much anything, called old mans beard, a major pest in NZ but cool all the same. and we have a shit-ton of epiphytes here, i'll get pics for those too

[morcroft]

That sounds great, Ja-Kha'jay! TOYB's done a ponga tree fern - you'll have to speak to him as to whether he wants to update the textures. All the rest sounds ideal.

How are your plant-modelling skills? I'm afraid I'm rubbish at organics: I can just about tweak an existing mesh but I've had little success at new models.

[Ja-Kha'jay]

i'll admit i've never modeled a plant, but i'm willing to give it a try once I'm done with the Senchal pieces. i have an idea how i'm going to approach doing leafy things, most of my ideas will just be eye candy, rather than harvestable material, things like wood-decaying fungi to place on fallen logs, and grassy epiphytes to place on trees and the like, the old mans beard, ill probably just make a plane, with a double sided texture and no collisions, real simple, something to attach to rocks and trees, the texture could also be used with speedtree to make it move around a bit in the branches.

[morcroft]

Eye candy's fine! Sounds like most of what you have planned will need to be hand-placed afret reqion gen. Anything that's to be hand placed can certainly wait until after the Senchal pieces. I'm mainly looking to get the stuff for region gen collected ASAP, because I think we need to be getting on with that real soon.

Leaves work as planes but they're better if the plane is curved, otherwise thaey have a habit of disappearing when edge-on..

It's very tricky getting stuff into speedtree - I did get the hang of the Spanish moss from the snowgum which I used extensively for Black Marsh. You don't get a lot of control over placement, so you'll see the snowgum has moss hanging from free space - it looks OK, but there's only so much you can do with it.