Landscaping tips: A place to share yours.

[Mike Viper]

Hey everyone. I was thinking about landscaping recently. What are your best tips on it? Incude lots of foliage? Lots of hills? Water? How would you make these elements look good?

My tips is 1x2 plates. They are great for detial, and can connect unlike the even more detailing 1x1 flat pieces. The plant leaves 6x5 (click on the one that says plant leaves 6x5)

http://www.peeron.com/cgi-bin/invcgis/p ... limit=none

Are great for moss effect. Most people don't like BURP, but those can also come in handy. Use one of the big ones,stick some vines and plant leaves on is, sorround it with trees bearing heavy plant leaf foliage, and make it like a cliff the person must climb to get whatever. It looks nice either way, even if it has no purpose.

Well, I'm out, you turn.[/code][/url]

EDIT: if theres a power to change the title, could that person please change the "yo" to "to". My bad.

[porschecm2]

Hmm...good topic, especially since I've been so interested in building landscape studies recently.

Lots of vegetation is good, if that's what the location calls for. But not all locations are overgrown, even forests. Picture real forests: you've got dense jungles, with foliage so thick you can't see more than a few feet; you've got deciduous forests, with minimal undergrowth, and widespread trees; you've got coniferous forests with tall, spindly trees and lots of undergrowth; and of course, many more, and many combinations of those.

And, some places just don't have much vegetation. For example, my latest MOC is set in a volcanic area, and I think I used a total of 4 green pieces(and a couple sand green for moss/lichen.) It does have 2 trees and a bush, but they're black and dk grey, to show burned and ash covered trees.

I think really it just comes down to what look you're going for. Remember, more isn't always better when it comes to foliage. And placement counts for alot, too. In this MOC, I built the 5 trees first, then placed and replaced them until I had something that both looked natural and gave the 'feel' I wanted. Going along with this, avoid having plantlife look deliberately placed. Think of where small bushes and vines grow naturally. Go for the 'random' factor without looking like you are.

Another major thing to remember is that in real life, very, very few places are naturally perfectly flat. So always try to break up any large expanses of flatness(such as a baseplate) with a few randomly scattered plates 1 or 2 plates high. I.E. avoid this.

The 3 most common ways to make hills/cliffs are BURPs/bricks, slopes, and a combination of both. I've seen all 3 used very effectively. BURPs/bricks is easier for most people, since building a mountain of slopes is heavily parts intensive. Also, building with BURPs/bricks allows studs on slopes, which can be handy for foliage, figs, snow, etc, such as here. Using slopes creates a smoother feel, which can be great for steep cliffs, as here, and grassy inclines. Here's an example of combining both.

Cm2

[Peppermint Pig]

Invest in green plates. Use brick colors you don't expect to use in the moc as padding to build up underneath the surfaces and greenery. Minimize overlap of green plate. You can use green brick on top and use flats of another color that you don't use much of underneath as well to create heights less than 1 brick tall in difference between green bricks.

Current project. It has some landscaping shots:
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=177303

SG doesn't usually use slopes unless it's for really steep areas where figs probably shouldn't be walking. Think of where your Lego figs traverse. Add wagon wheel divots (grooves) in the road, and avoid too much vegetation in the walking spaces of the figs. Don't forget boulders, pebbles, etc where a great deal of traffic could be.

Dark tan plates are great as wet sand. You'll have to build up around them since Lego only makes fairly big or long dark tan plates only so far.

Water is a tricky topic for designers. Often, blue is the color to use, but others might want some sort of transparency for a shallow pond. Waterfalls work great with blue slopes, and all the shades of blue to white to show dispersion of the particles at the base of the waterfall. Seashores work good with a little teal and light blue in the surf waves further away from the shore, and bold white crests nearer.

If you have a shady forest where the tops of the trees make the pieces below darken, you can get away with adding teal plates on the ground vs using dark green or green in general. This is a color theory technique I've learned in painting/art. It helps to create a 'cooling' feeling without having to resort to black or any of the dark shade colors that would have negative effects on photographing. The same thing works for bright or warm areas: Pepper meadows or open fields with lime, sand green, or bright green plates to suggest grass growth/discoloration.

It tends to be better for vignettes where you have a good idea about the camera positions, but you can do medium blue castle walls for one side, to suggest a lighting effect. Peppering blue 'stones' into walls is good.

Also a neat technique, if you're doing a cobblestone wall, try a snot design: lay two bricks on their sides, with their bottoms facing each other, then connect them to a 1x1 snot brick of some sort. Offset these sideways bricks to create a dishevelled look, and create a stack 2 or 3 tall in this manner. Lay or connect some 2x2 gray plates on top to cover up the spaces between the bricks below.

I like using prefab lego trees, but sometimes you need much larger fig-proportional trees.. Whatever you choose, be consistent and avoid mixing too many different design styles.

That's all I can think of right now.