Treeline at Caloundra City Private School -Session Two

Since the rain kept on coming I brought some cuttings from my garden so the students could experience making a virtual plant from photographs of a real plant. We spent most of the day photographing and learning how to manipulate images in Photoshop, extracting them from a background and pasting to build up bushes and trees.
Taking photographs for textures is an art. You have to forget most of what constitutes 'good' photographic practice and take an image with no background, little variation in tone  and light, with the subject floating in the middle of the image.
It was a very intense session with a lot of learning of quite complex skills. The students, and the school, can be proud of the participants in this project.
The build is progressing. Below are a few images, the first two showing some of the plants made from photographs. And the third showing a beautiful tree created from a painting by one of the students.

The garden we are building on Imagination sim in Inworldz is a fantasy garden full of colour. Many of the plants are imaginary, and even those built up from photographs sometimes bear little resemblance to the real life plant. In making these plants, building up the images, and seeing how the garden is progressing we are learning something about plants, about how they are constructed, their sizes, shapes textures, and the place of plants in landscapes and in our psyche. If we had to populate a new world (even a virtual one) we would want to have plants around us.