Looking for advice and techniques for tree leaves

Snowman

I am working something for school and I am in the process of creating trees for a level.Now making the actual tree isn't the problem it's more so the leaves.

Now I have seen a few tutorials online but I can never get a solid look and I spend time looking at various games and looking at how the different trees are done and I was just wondering if anyone professional or not had any good advice on creating tree leaves and good placement of the planes.

I'm just interested to see how professionals who do this go about it and the different techniques they may use.

TSM

The biggest reason you are not getting the 'full' look - is because in most games, they use SpeedTree which always has the leaves facing the player creating a very full look. You can't really do that in Max without a custom shader.

Ben Apuna

Here's a thread from the past that might help you out.

http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=55749&highlight=cutting+out+foliage

Snowman

thanks for the links

Filbot

As far as reference / source images: http://www.earthflora.com/artificial_branches.htm

Mark Dygert

Since you're a 3dsmax user, I say use the treemaker script (posted in the linked to thread) its a great little script and uses particles to create facing planes, which can be converted to regular non facing planes if you wish. It's an automated version of the way Andy Zibits does it (at the bottom of the linked thread).

You can also use a slightly more advanced method using Particle Flow, a birth event and selecting your branches as the spawn event. The neat thing about using particle flow is that once you set up particle view you can easily copy that set up to other trees and randomize it. This allows you to fillout whole forests with different leaves without having to set up every tree.

If you're looking for more ways to increase the canopy density than just adding more planes, then it gets a little more specific to the type of tree, how big it is, how close people get to it, what angle(s) it will be viewed at bla bla bla. And at that point its probably best to dig up some ref and ask how to make that particular tree, but be sure to give it the context in which the tree will be viewed.

Ghostscape

TSM wrote: »

The biggest reason you are not getting the 'full' look - is because in most games, they use SpeedTree which always has the leaves facing the player creating a very full look. You can't really do that in Max without a custom shader.

Make a plane, give it a look-at constraint tied to the camera, repeat as needed. Instant Face-sprites in the viewport.

sardonix

You can get lots of leaves fast if you use particles. I use pcloud on a very simple noisy geosphere that is not renderable. I create a plane and put a double sided leaf image on it with an alpha channel. Make sure to adjust the spin time, and change the particle size and spin time variation. Choose a number of particles to create in the Use Total setting in the Particle Generation rollout. Move the time slider to a frame you like, create a Mesher object that will duplicate the particle system as geomety, and convert the mesher object to an edpoly so it doesn't animate.

Have fun