planting a lot of trees on an island

I have an island - and I would like to plant a lot of trees on it - so i can then go in and create clearings etc

Planting trees one by one is very time consuming - does anyone have ant tricks or tips for creating a realistic forest quickly.

It never struck me as that difficult, but then I've never done it myself.

Just for an interesting illustration, thinking about this reminds me of how Qarl Linden arranged a field of mushrooms in the final third of his famous Sculpted Prims video – youtube.com/watch?v=LlfpACg_lww (he plays with size and rotation, then selects them, makes copies of the group, applies rotation to those groups, and then adds a final touch of variation to a few individuals).

(Of course, you probably shouldn't ask Qarl about forests right now; he's already got himself quite deep in sculpted prim discussion and programming.)

It's extremely time consuming on a large piece of land. But the way that I used to do it is pretty much like Qarl did in that video.

Put down a few trees by hand in a pleasing formation.

Select them all. Drag copy them. Rotate the bunch and position. Do this two or three times.

Select all of those. Lather, rinse, repeat.

At any point during this, you can take one of those groups into inventory, so that you can rez it as a huge group later. You just have to make sure that you have the edit dialog open when you rez it, so that they are all selected after you rez them. And rename the object in inventory so that you know what it is and how many trees are in it.

If the ground height is variable, then you still end up having to reposition the heights of many trees.

And then the other big trick is how to select trees. They can be frustrating sometimes because you aren't sure exactly what's selected (if they're Linden trees). I usually turn on Client>Rendering>Hide Selected when I'm selecting them. This way, the trees disappear as you select them. When you don't see anything left, you know they are all selected. Turn off Hide Selected and continue as usual.

I've also seen some scripted solutions, but none of the ones I tried did the job to my satisfaction.

There are plant rezzer objects that will automate this task for you. I can't find any on SLExchange but I have seen them in-world. Maybe someone can reply with a pointer, or you could post in the Products Wanted forum.

Barebones outline of a simple script:

- choose how many trees you want planted in the Sim

Then for each tree, loop:

- x = random # from 0 to 255.99
- y = random # from 0 to 255.99
- llSetPos to get to position x,y (best to use WarpPos script to overcome the 10m barrier)
- <b>use llGround to find the ground height at x,y</b>
- use llRezObject to rez your tree at <x,y,groundheight>

Not a very difficult script to write.

(You'd probably want a number of preselected trees in the prim contents, and have the available options stored in a list in the script, so you'd have a random tree rezzed each time.)