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Autumn tree study

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Proudbucket
Lvl 18Journeyman Narwhal
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*This entry refers to things built in the Massivecraft server, be sure to check it out

Autumn tree study
Wandering around Regalia it is impossible not to notice a few special trees with foliage of unusual colours. This is achieved thanks to Massivecraft's resource pack assigning special colours to some biomes.
Examples:

Autumn tree study
^Trees with yellow foliage at the Ithanian district.
Autumn tree study
^A tree with some yellow foliage at the left and a very uncommon tree from the apothecary a the right.
Autumn tree study
^ Some kind of dark vines at the sewers.

Then I saw some beautiful trees in Jorhild and thought... why are we only using the main colour of one biome? why are gradients not being used? The transition between biomes produces leaves that are shades of the main colours of each biome. The use of gradients may help to produce beautiful realistic trees. At the end I found out that there are both advantages and difficulties related with the usage of gradients but let me explain my experiment first.

^Some endermen chilling out next to some trees with colour gradients.

I tried to create an autumn tree with gradients of green and leaves that are turning yellow, orange and red. From what I have seen, trees keep green leaves next to the trunk and turn yellow or red at the distal part. I tried to emulate this by having the centre of the tree in a river biome that is surrounded by ice plains and extreme hills biome. The resulting tree is here:

^ An excercice of an Autumn tree.

Creating the tree was relatively easy but creating small biome areas with world painter was a little cumbersome (but perhaps that is just me being inexperienced). I can imagine that this problem would be further increased if the build staff had to modified the biomes of a map with the pressure of knowing that while they do so the server is down. A second problem is that of the limit between biomes makes the grass look ugly. I dealt with this problem by replacing the ground with a mixture of dirt, gravel and mossy cobblestone but it generates a barren impression. Having done this I can see why gradients in trees are not commonly used.

Still, for very special trees this may be a good option. Perhaps if a Yanar tree is regrown it may have special shades. The problem with grass is one that can be solved by modifying the resource pack. It may be useful to have biomes with the same grass tone but different leaf colours or different shades of one colour. A mixture of biomes in the survival worlds may create interesting locations with varied trees that are painted with a bit of randomness.

What do you think? Do you use the transition between biomes of do you find it annoying? Do you think a larger palette of foliage colours is needed?

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  Have something to say?

Xenoniuss
10/30/2016 6:48 am
Level 41 : Master Ladybug
I really like the concept, well done!

Shame minecraft doesn't have any proper seasons...
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BubbyDucks
10/28/2016 11:31 am
Level 1 : New Miner
It looks fine, Well I think the problem is with the pack your using, the colors simply aren't vibrant enough to really represent autumn trees, this is all modified with the colormap on the texture pack. you did make a good build though.

What lots of people do instead of only manually changing the biome is recolor specific leaves (particularly Birch and I think Acacia as they aren't affected by color maps) for the use of non-green trees. Sometimes its not exclusive to season either, it can be used to make things such as Cherry Blossoms or fantasy mystically colored trees.

The only problem with this method is it may seem out of place for more "realistic" oriented packs.

I like the idea of seasonal maps, the only problem is they usually need dedicated textures to have it look super fab'

Keep up the good work.
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