From the course: InfraWorks 2017 Essential Training

Creating trees - InfraWorks Tutorial

From the course: InfraWorks 2017 Essential Training

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Creating trees

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- [Voiceover] Now that you've redesigned some of the major features of your world, such as adding roads and buildings and regrading 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 4 of Lynda Heights Model and I've selected a proposal called Create Trees. I've also chosen the common area ISO bookmark. Let's start with looking at the tree commands that we have available, if I click the Core Tools Icon and then click the Design icon, I'll see two tree commands: Row of Trees and Stand of Trees. Now if I'm creating individual trees, I can use either one. So let's start with Row of Trees and I'd like to create some palm trees along this front edge of the parking lot but I want them to be individual trees that I can manage each one on its own. So, as you can see, there's quite a long list of tree styles to pick from so to make life a little easier, I'm going to type in the word Palm and I've got one palm tree to pick from, its a South Carolina palm tree and we are in California so we'll have to agree this is a bit of a stretch. It's very easy to customize the content you have available in InfraWorks 360 so if there were a specific type of palm that you wanted to use and you had access to it's 3D model you could most definitely add it as a choice in this interface. So choose that style and I'm just going to double-click a few spots along the front of this parking lot. Place about five trees individually located in that area. So as you can see, the tree models are pretty detailed, they're very realistic looking, it's very easy to add them. Notice how they were automatically placed on the ground's surface even though the elevations might be slightly different so the tool is smart enough to know to position the trees vertically on the surface of the terrain rather than burying them or floating them above the ground. This is where you want them to be, you want them to be planted on the surface of the ground. So now let's talk about placing a row of trees along this back edge of the property. To serve as a visual and sound barrier between the homes that will be built at the top of the hill along the road and this common area where there could be some noise and definitely some activity with folks playing tennis, people in the pool, and just community activities, traffic in and out of the clubhouse, that sort of thing. So I'm going to launch the same command Row of Trees and there's a style in here that's very well-suited for this barrier-type of effect that I've described to you and it's actually a hedge so I'm going to type in the word, Hedge and I'm going to choose this oval hedge style. Now this time instead of double-clicking individual points, I'm going to pick with a single-click operation, points along this area. drawing a line basically with multiple segments and when I get to the last point, I'll go ahead and double-click. I'm going to double-click right there. Right now, our row of trees is really sad. Those are trees are very small. I'll press escape a few times to clear the selection. The trees are very small and they're sparely arranged along the alignment that we drew. We're going to address that in an upcoming video but for now, we just wanna show how to actually lay out the the trees, we'll get into some editing and we'll show you how to re-size those trees and make them more densely arranged along that alignment. So now let's look at a Stand of Trees, so that's using the Row of Trees command, we created individual trees and we created an actual row of trees but now let's look at a Stand. I'm going to click the Stand of Trees option and scroll down and pick a style that I want to use. There's this really impressive red style here, I'm going to choose that and then I can close down the Select Draw Style asset card. I'm just gonna go in this area and draw a shape. Something like this, filling up this open space that I have. And notice this steep embankment that we have here, that's going to become important in just a second. I'll double-click the final point and InfraWorks 360 is going to populate the area that I selected with the tree style that I chose. I'll hit Escape a few times and the reason I pointed out the embankment is that I wanted to show you how smart the software is in even though it placed a bunch of trees with one action, it was smart enough to place each one individually on the surface of the terrain so I don't have a situation where the trees are buried or floating above the terrain even though I placed them all at once. It does a really good job of matching the base of the tree to the terrain so that it looks actually quite natural. Notice also that it randomly spaced and sized the trees also making it look quite natural. And, by the way, it did that with the row of trees as well. You can see the different sizes and the different spacings that were automatically applied, again, to make everything look natural. You don't want your tree row to look like soldiers standing at attention perfectly spaced because that's not how the trees are going to look in real life. So there you have it, three ways to create trees, Individual Trees, Rows of Trees and Stands of Trees.

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