So I've been wanting to play with the environment art for a while and now that Beta 4 is out I figured I'd pull up some of the related xml and see what I could do.  All I did for starters was load up \Core Tiles\CoreForests.xml and double the value of most of the <..LeafSize> entries, with the hope of making forests be larger, fuller, and have more of a presence.  Here are the results:

Overall I think it already looks much better - forests look more like actual forests instead of loose collections of trees, and they really fill out the world and give a greater sense of scale.  Obviously there's still plenty of tweaking to be done, I haven't yet figured out if there's a way to adjust the placement of the cards so for now they are all still centered in the same spot which means a lot of them are clipping through the ground.  Also want to see if I can cut down the density, nice as it looks the sprites are clipping through eachother a lot as you rotate the camera.  If anybody has any insights on where to find code for either of these it'd be greatly appreciated.

One other thing I found odd is the sizes don't seem to be consistent between games.  In some games, like above, they're quite large whereas in others, like below, they seem much closer to the original sizes. 

Also worth noting is that reverting back to the original CoreForests.xml does not seem to change them back.  Reinstalling the game seemed to be the only way to revert them once changed.  Not sure what's going on there, maybe there is another directory I should be using besides the actual Elemental directory?

Anyway, here is the file for anyone who'd like to see it and doesn't want to bother changing all the values themselves:

http://www.copernicanstudios.com/elemental/07312010/CoreForests.xml