Creating trees

- Now that you've redesigned some of the major features of your world, such as adding roads and buildings and re-grading some of the terrain, it's time to look at bringing your model to life by adding some detail. A good place to start is with some trees. Let's take a look. I'm in the Chapter 04 Lynda Heights model, and I've chosen a proposal called Create Trees. I'd like to show you three different ways of creating trees in your model. I'll start by choosing the Common Area Iso bookmark, and that zooms me into my common area.

So let's start by creating a few palm trees along this side of the parking lot. If I open my InfraWorks Core Tools by clicking the orange I, and then click the Create tool, I'll see a couple of tree commands that I can use. There's one called Row of Trees and one called Stand of Trees. I can use either one of these to create individual trees, so I'll choose row. Next I'll choose the style of tree that I want to add, and I'd like to add some palm trees.

So to make the choice a little easier, I'm gonna type in the word palm. You'll see that my one choice is a South Carolina Palmtree. We're in California, but this can be close enough for our purposes. So I'll click that style, and then I'll simply double click a point in the model to insert that tree. I'll do a few of them along the side, four or five of them just to make a row of individual trees. I'll press Escape two times, and then I can go and admire my work.

You can see that these tree models are fairly detailed. They really do bring the model to life. So that's how you add individual trees. So what about a row of trees? Let's say for our design here we want to put a barrier row of trees along this back side. We're going to have homes built in this area, and perhaps we want to shield those homes from some of the activity that's going to be going on here, people playing tennis, people in the pool, activities going on in the common area.

We just wanna create a visual and sound shield using some tall pine trees. So this time I'll launch the Row of Trees command, and there happens to be a type of tree that works pretty well. It's called a Hedge. There's a tree in here called an Oval Hedge, and it actually makes a really nice barrier row of conifer trees when you configure it just the right way. So I'll choose that style, and this time instead of double clicking locations for individual trees, I'm going to single click a series of points, and I'll just pick the top of this embankment here to draw out a row of trees.

When I get to the last point, I can double click. Now my row of trees looks pretty sad right now. They're small and sparse, and in the next video we'll learn how to make them bigger, and fuller, and more numerous. But for now, we're going to have to live with them just the way they are. So finally, I wanna look at creating a stand of trees. Pretty much the same concept as a row, although instead of drawing a line, you're drawing a shape. So I'll click my Stand of Trees tool.

I'm gonna pick this really nice red T19 VO3 style and just draw a shape up here. You can see that we've done a little work to this model since the last chapter. We've added some area for tennis courts, an area for a couple of pools, and re-graded this back part and kind of created this higher tier up here. So to create our stand of trees, I'm simply going to draw a shape in this green area. Notice that there's a pretty steep hill here that I'm climbing.

When I double click my last point, it's going to populate that area with trees, and it's going to conform to the terrain. So even though I've got this steep embankment here, the trees don't get buried in the ground so to speak. The command is smart enough to follow the contour of the land and insert the trees on the surface of the land. So there you have it, three ways to create trees: individual trees, rows of trees, and a stand of trees.