Seamless 32x32 Pine Tree Woes

[DaveC86]

Hey guys.. so I sat around for like 3 hours today trying to draw a single 32x32 pine tree... I'm not too happy with my results or the fact that I have hundreds of other tiles still to draw >_< I'm looking for some tips / pearls of wisdom on how I can make these more pleasing to the eye..

So as you can see I went through various iterations, I thought I'd done fairly well with some of the early ones.. they looked okay in isolation, but when I tile them, they blur together in a hideous mess.



I thought this one was looking good... but when scaled 5x ( as it will be in my game ) it looks extremely hard on the eyes.. I tried experimenting with shifting hue/saturation etc. but it seems to be fundamentally ugly.



Then I moved in this direction.. it seems to be better and worse at the same time... in isolation I don't like the look of it, but it does seem to tile a little more cleanly..



I'm too many hours in to construct much more of a coherent sentence.. hope this will suffice >_< thanks in advance for any tips!

[eishiya]

I don't know what look you're going for, but have you tried making the forest tiles that aren't just one tree over and over, but a tiling pattern of multiple trees, possibly indistinct ones? That could look more like a forest. Tiling the same tree with all its detail inevitably starts to look like an artificial pattern rather than a forest, I think. That's not necessarily a bad thing though, it can work very well for a game where the maps are meant to be symbolic rather than representative.

Among your individual trees, I think the last one has the best sense of volume, but it's too symmetrical. If you tweak that, it should look pretty good!

[Jehannum]

trees grow out of the ground but you have a distinct lack of ground if it's a rainforest then I can understand the blanket coverage, but they don't look like rain forest type trees.



I've included this example so you can get a better idea of what's missing. I believe the shadow under the tree has a slightly blue tinge because of how light works, but you can read more about that on this site, plus it has a lot of useful info about how to "obliterate" the grid and avoid overly repetitive tiling.

http://www.yarrninja.com/pixeltutorial/