Question about procedural forest/grass generation

Questions & Answers
1

Hello,

I have been looking into this topic for quite some time now and can’t really find a solotion other then randomly placing objects in a specified area using Random.Range…

What I would like to do is generate plots for trees and grass to spawn using something like peril noise but I can’t figure it out. Can someone just simply explain to me how you would generate a forest using something like peril noise similar to this example:

Map Example

Were all the dots are trees.

Current system I have just generates trees way to far apart and makes the world seem bare:

alt text

2

This script generates a forest based on some noise texture.
The noise texture can be though of as a “likelyness” map describing what the change of a tree spawning is at a given position. This can be controlled with the density variable. With a density of 1 the script produces this result:

99250-forest.png
99250-forest.png859×409 435 KB

The script picks a random size based on two values. This can of course be changed as well as doing the same for rotation.

using UnityEngine;

public class ForestGenerator : MonoBehaviour {

    public GameObject tree;
    public float minTreeSize;
    public float maxTreeSize;
    public Texture2D noiseImage;
    public float forestSize;
    public float treeDensity;

    private float baseDensity = 5.0f;

	// Use this for initialization
	void Start () {
        Generate();
	}

    public void Generate() {

        for(int y = 0; y < forestSize; y++) {

            for(int x = 0; x < forestSize; x++) {

                float chance = noiseImage.GetPixel(x, y).r / (baseDensity/treeDensity);

                if (ShouldPlaceTree(chance)) {
                    float size = Random.Range(minTreeSize, maxTreeSize);

                    GameObject newTree = Instantiate(tree);
                    newTree.transform.localScale = Vector3.one * size;
                    newTree.transform.position = new Vector3(x, 0, y);
                    newTree.transform.parent = transform;
                }
            }
        }
    }

    //Returns true or false given some chance from 0 to 1
    public bool ShouldPlaceTree(float chance) {
        if (Random.Range(0.0f, 1.0f) <= chance) {
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
}

Hope it helps as inspiration :wink: