Thursday, June 4th, 2020 —> “Planting Trees”

Thursday, June 4th, 2020 —> +23°C  / +72°F —> Mostly cloudy & Muggy here in Atlantic Canada @ 7:30-ish pm. –

– “My first Speed Tree” With this Version. –

— Windows 10 still hates me. I downloaded the latest version of ‘Speed Trees” that I need for ‘creating’ trees to replace the place-holding leafless monstrosities I snitched from an example area. I downloaded this new version three times and it kept telling me that I was an idiot and it didn’t want to work for me. I almost gave up. But I stumbled into the start/stop menu and noticed that the ‘alias’ for speed trees said it was for (32) bit machines – so I waded through the “All Programs” files and opened up the “Speed Trees” folder and clicked on the (64) bit folder and clicked on the “modeler” app and it blinked at me and said, “Oh, that’s what you want- Okay!” and opened right up.

— And in the ‘manual’ it says ‘click here’ to see what I’m talking about – and when I did that I got more confused than usual – until I realized the link shot me to YouTube video tutorials for the wrong Version. A woman who knew how to set the volume levels while she recorded the wrong version’s tutorials didn’t quite blow me out of the room. But when I found the right version’s tutorials the guy was speaking so softly I thought the woman had blown my speakers. In his second tutorial video, that guy got it right and by the time I got through a couple tutorials – I felt confident and stupid enough to jump in and try to generate myself a tree. The tree above is the first tree I ‘created’ from scratch.

— Let me step back a bit —>

– “Randomized Conifer” There are several example trees already made that came with the software. I clicked ‘randomize’ and it said, “You’re stupid, but if you really want to do this-…” and removed a lot of lower branches. –

— Before I went wading through instructions and tutorials I clicked on “Example trees” and blinked and it gave me a really tall conifer, and I clicked on “Randomize” { Just in case the graphic screen shot didn’t load for you } and it warned me that I would lose a bunch of detail – but what the heck – I told it to go ahead, and the above is what it gave me. 🙂  I thought, okay, that’s weird. – But what the heck? – And I saved it. It might look okay sunk into the ground to maybe halfway up the trunk … and then the software got nervous and told me, ‘You can’t save that here, how about we save it somewhere on your computer?’ – I said, “Sure – why the bleep not?” – and had to convince it that I wanted to plop it on my desktop for now – where it would be a lot easier to pull it back up later and mess with it, or whatever… Almost every program/app these days thinks everybody should love to have to search through half a million ‘documents’ anytime they want to open a file or look at something they worked on and saved yesterday before some random weather event shut down the local electrical grid or maybe a snowplow took out a utility pole or something – and achieved the same end, “Boom, crackle crackle – Fzzzzt!” – And our UPS guardian thingamajig beeped like crazy for an hour or so when nobody was in the building to hear it and then … “OMG – where’s all the work I hope I saved????”

– An Experimental second tree, I told it to be a “Spruce” and this is what I got. –

— Nature doesn’t subscribe to human sensibilities and I was really glad this tree isn’t perfectly symmetrical.  I’ll have to ask my cuter than heck cousin, the botanist – if this looks like an actual ‘other than Colorado Blue-” spruce tree – or do the ‘normal’ needles belong to some other species. But wait a minute- If I’m building a world for a computer game that doesn’t necessarily look exactly like this one – That might be a ‘Plejarin’ Spruce or something…

– This was one of their example – pre-finished trees. I altered it a bit –

— In their tutorial, they use this palm tree as an example of how you can bend and twist your trunk around – I ‘played with it’ and lengthened the trunk a bit and tried to get it to stand up a bit straighter after its bend. And this looks okay to me.

– This Palm Tree – I ‘built’ from scratch – I actually lengthened the fronds a bit and I wasn’t happy that most of them stood pretty much straight up and none of the ‘magnet’ tools I clicked on bent the fronds down… But I don’t think I ever saw a real Palm Tree in real life – so maybe they look like this? –

— Interesting? Next time I’ll give a palm tree longer fronds.

– “Ash Saplings” – I wasn’t sure what I’d get when I clicked on the template that generated several Saplings. here – but yeah – I like the results. –

— & Hey! I don’t have to ‘plant’ a forest with only huge mature trees. – Maybe next time I can ‘create’ a bunch of baby Christmas trees?

– I thought this was cool, but maybe I’m a sucker? – This is one of their example broad leaf trees with roots hanging on to some rocks. I like the rocks…. –

— Yum? A broad-leaf tree with roots wrapped around some unusually rounded rocks. And it looks like somebody cut off a couple lower branches.
“Speed Trees” – in their tutorials, want to make sure you put ‘caps’ on broken or sawed off stumps of branches. It took me a little bit of trial and error to realize that when you put the ‘cap’ on the broken top of a tree – that puts caps on all broken/sawed off branches.

– “Another broad-leaf tree.” I defined this one.-

— The first time I tried to add roots to a tree trunk – before I added branches – all the branches wanted to hang out down at the roots – Which I found quite ‘irksome’. – And until I deleted the roots and the branches, I couldn’t find the editing stuff to pick the branches up and tell them to bond with the tree trunk – not the roots. –

— I wasn’t going to show you all my experiments and goofs here – but I did.

— I’m pretty happy with what I did here today – most results were surprising and most of them were positive surprises.

— Yeah, I can live with this…

————— Have a good life….

~~~~~ Jim