Random Placement Foliage Brush

[MadameEvil]

Hello!

I think having a brush where people can paint in tree types with various rotations, heights, and placement within a paintbrush area would be incredibly helpful for filling out large areas outside of the habitats. I really dislike leaving the areas around the Zoo barren. It takes me 10+ hours to place hundreds of trees to make it seem like the zoo isn't in an empty plane in the middle of nowhere. With this users could select the foliage brush, adjust size and density, and then the tree type they want to use. The paintbrush would then take the height variations of the tree type they selected and place them in the brush area according to the density set. This could also be done with plants and rocks as well.

Here is an example from another game I play, City Skylines, with a tool a user made in the workshop. Hopefully including this image can better describe what I'm talking about.

Tool credit: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=502750307

Hopefully, the images help and people understand what I'm talking about

 

[jcp011c]

I would absolutely love something like this. It would go a long ways towards making habitats look natural.

 

[sockeyejo]

Another vote for this. I know you can create a group with a selection of foliage, rocks etc and then copy and paste it but this would be much simpler.

 

[DrBurrito]

I've wanted this feature for quite some time now. Particularly to be able to create procedurally generated, natural looking spaces (i.e. foliage that was hypothetically there before the zoo) that would contrast against foliage inside manmade habitats or zoo landscaping in general. Both types of placement would be necessary to design realistic looking maps.

Plant brush

This would really help to cover the more naked parts of the zoo. I'd make it so that you could pick a group of plants and then choose the density of it whether you want a dense forest or a patchier forest. This would make prettying up the zoo so much easier as, like in JW:E, I can just paint...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[MicHaeL MonStaR]

Yes. Something like this has been possible as far back as the original 'RollerCoaster Tycoon' games, albeit not exactly random, you could at least just hold down the mouse-button and paint in the landscape with whatever items you wanted.
But being able to actually "paint" in a bunch of random foliage started to crop up in engines like CryEngine and Dunia, and games like 'Crysis' and 'Far Cry 2' came with editors that allowed you to do so. - This was back around 2007.

In this game, you can only place one piece at a time per click, which makes things more methodical, but also slow and limiting. - One could reason that it prevents players from overloading the world and thus bog down the engine in terms of performance, but if they'd implement it properly, such as not letting the density go too high or something like that, it could be a great tool to have.

Also, I'd argue this could be handy for more things than just nature-based objects.

But when it comes to foliage and such in particular, it would make it especially great if you could select a few different objects (like by holding down Ctrl and clicking a few items in the inventory), for example a bush and a tree or two types of trees and three types of bushes, which then would be combined in the mix of the "painting" tool. - On top of that, some more options like "density" and "variation" and things like that would be great to have as well, besides the obvious size of the brush and the like.

That said, I'd first like to see some more consistency in the painting of terrain to begin with, which seems to respond differently for each type.
For example: You need to set the intensity rather high for any long grass to show up, but it disappears way more easily when painting over long grass with anything else.
Then also each type of ground seems to show up at a different intensity when they're kept at the same intensity-setting.
It doesn't really make much sense and it's just a lot of back and forth. But yea, that's a different topic. It's just that I'm not sure how well any other type of "painting"-tool would work then.

 

[Planetwildlife]

And for the record, I would like to pick plants for placement foliage brush when laying out the plants when making any themed enclosure in my zoo.

 

[AndyZoos]

Fully back this idea.

 

[Tyrian]

Spray brush and brush shapes would be awesome.
Also a "paint lock inside habitat" function.

 

[AlexSea]

Yes please! It's such a pain to manually place trees en masse while still making it look natural, especially to fill in the empty spaces where there aren't any habitats. Prehistoric Kingdom has something like this. Why can't Planet Zoo have it too?