Landscape Generator

[ninapaley]

I believe backgrounds like this can be automatically generated:

When I make my own landcsapes in Flash or Moho, I make a small collection of assets - trees, hills, maybe mountains - and re-size and arrange multiple copies of each. Above is a very simple example comprised of the parts below:





My hope is that by having a repository of specific landscape svgs, one can just push a button and have a different background every time. Obviously there have to be rules, like lower things are always in front of higher things (you can't have a tree trunk showing out the bottom of a hill!), and larger trees should be in front of smaller ones (depth!), but everything's orientation remains the same.

Right now there is a folder called "svg" that contains symbols. I don't want to mix other assets, like landscape parts and waves and clouds with those. For my part, I'll need someplace to put the landscape assets I create.

Also, these are already colored, with gradients. Is there a way to globally color-shift everything, to get a little variety? Like make everything darker by the same amount, or bluer, or redder? If that can also be randomly generated (within parameters that keep it from looking terrible and/or insane) that would add more variety with no (human) work.

Ultimately, this should be combinable with the animated waves and clouds ( #15 ), for really cool backgrounds.

[toolness]

Hey @ninapaley do you want to start uploading some of these symbols into the assets folder? I just added a subfolder in there called landscape-generation that you can start uploading stuff to, if you want.

[toolness]

Err actually I just renamed it to landscapes.

[ninapaley]

Yay thanks @toolness ! I just uploaded the landscape assets I made back in February. Nothing is trimmed to size. I can trim and re-upload after I take a nap (I just got back from my LONGEST BIKE RIDE EVER! 106 miles! I'm pooped!) or you can trim them. I may eventually re-draw all of these; they are just a start.

[ninapaley]

I just re-did the trees because the previous versions had varying line widths which MysticSymbolic doesn't support. They now have shapes for trunks/branches.

But they are shaded with gradients. Do we support gradients? If not I'll re-do them with flat colors.

Speaking of flat colors, maybe I should just make the trees black and white like other symbols, and the landscape maker can color them. Does that make sense @toolness ?

[ninapaley]

I just uploaded a set of black-and-white landscape assets, with "_BW" in their names (ie "tree3_BW").

Since we're meeting today I want to discuss how we'll color the landscapes.
I can certainly make some stock palettes.
But this is also an ideal opportunity for @mittimithai to do some color modulation, as groups of trees will look best in similar, but slightly varied colors.
Macromedia Flash allowed colored symbols to be "tinted"; you choose a color and apply a variable %age of it to a given symbol. I used this feature a lot in Sita Sings the Blues to create subtle differences in shades, as in these waves which get tinted lighter as they recede:

We could do that in MysticSymbolic too. It creates lovely "atmospheric perspective" in landscapes. Also an easy way to do shade modulation.