3D Trees----Tutorials?
polycounter lvl 8
I'm making a test level in unity, and i'm very happy with how things are turning out, but I need to clutter up my environment a bit, and to be honest, trees always gave me a hard time.
Anyone know of any tutorials to make some convincing trees for games?
Anyone know of any tutorials to make some convincing trees for games?
Replies
http://web.archive.org/web/20071116155322/bk-coffeehouse.cottages.polycount.com/tut/realtimetree1.html
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/tree-maker
12min
Fully unwrapped
416 tris
You probably need to explore the setting some more, it makes really low poly trees too. Out of the box its high poly with a lot of leaves. but there are options to turn on facing planes that can be converted to regular geometry. You can dial up or down the number of planes it uses to suit your needs.
You'll probably want to set the main detail setting to low or very low. This effects how many rings are in the trunk and and branches.
In branch options:
Adjust the Minimum branch length controls the number of branches. Its the distance (in percent of trunk length) it travels before it creates a branch so higher numbers result in lower branch counts, I use 30%-60%.
In leaf options:
Set the leaf type to facing, turn up the size and set the number of leaves per twig pretty low. To get the leaves to face the camera scrub the bar.
I find a good angle that works (normally front or side), take a snapshot (Tools> Snapshot > mesh). Then select all the leaves, copy and rotate them on their local axis with "use pivot point center" turned on.
Unwrapping is a snap.
For the leaves you select them all, apply UVW Mapping (not unwrap UVW) and select face, collapse and apply Unwrap UVW to see that all the leaf planes where mapped to the same 0-1 space.
For the trunk, it depends on the shape either standard cylinder unwrap with relax or maybe a bit of pelt mapping, but it shouldn't take that long. 30min including doing textures seems a little generous.
It might be helpful to unwrap the branches and trunk before generating connections. Just be sure to collapse the pieces back down to editable mesh before generating.
http://learnfobia.com/category-Maya-129/tutorial-Sprite-Based-Particle-Trees-2259.html
Tree with crossing-plane foliage
http://www.andyzibits.com/tut_particle_tree_generation.html
Tree with planar foliage
http://www.game-artist.net/forums/support-tech-discussion/11251-trees-beginners-3ds-max-tutorial.html
Here is an attempt to recreate the tutorial by Jeramy Cooke, I hope he doesn't mind. I don't take any credit for this info.
By Jeramy Cooke:
I thought I would share this technique for making low/med poly trees for games. It should work just as well for high poly trees but it would mean making the initial branch by hand instead of using textured polys.
Step 1: Make the basic branch texture. For this step I used Mayas PaintFX but you could paint this by hand as well.
Step 2: Create the inital branch structure. This is essentially just a rotated quad with an extra poly pulled out. This structure is great because it gives you good fill and fullness from a lot of directions as well as hinting at the structure of the smaller branches.
Step 3: Loft a trunk. Lofting is by far the best way to make a low poly trunk as you can very accurately control the number of verts by using multiple cross sections with different numbers of sides. The final benefit is that the lofter will give you a really nice set of UVs that would be a pain to create by hand. One final thing to keep in mind is the locations where you intend branches to sprout off of.
Step 4: This is where it gets interesting. Trees are essentially a fractal struture so I set about building it in a fractal way. I take the initial branch and copy it a few times and scale and rotate it to create a cluster of 3 branches.
Step 5: I then take that cluster from step 4 and clone it three times at the top of the tree. Then grab the polys from the top of the tree that those branches are attached to and clone off a copy. You now have a new larger cluster.
Step 6: Then repeat steps 4 and 5 until you have a whole tree. You should only have to do this 2 or 3 times till the large branch you have pretty much fills in half the tree. This fractal approach mimics the way a tree grows and is heavily influenced by the shapes you choose for the initial trunk.
As you can see you end up with a nice full tree for very few polygons. The only real downside is that there is a lot of overdraw for realtime applications. Hope this helps some folks.
http://www.frecle.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=780
or just nick them
Spaced out and sparse like a blue spruce, or short and bushy like a dwarf spruce?
Do enough of these and you start to become a plant nerd... wee.
For the sparse spruce I would use the same methods, create a trunk in this case a stick populate it with branches a few ways, the particle method works but takes some time to set up, (thats why I like treemaker it uses the same system but automates it).
I would probably just make a few different branches and use a script like Neil Blevins Object Painter Script to randomize the branches and click place each branch on the trunk.
Hopefully its pretty clear what you would do with the dense and stubby version...
http://www.yofrankie.org/tutorial-low-poly-tree-part-1/
http://www.yofrankie.org/tutorial-low-poly-tree-part-2/
http://www.yofrankie.org/tutorial-low-poly-tree-part-3/
http://www.yofrankie.org/tutorial-low-poly-tree-part-4/
http://www.yofrankie.org/tutorial-low-poly-tree-part-5/
NG Plant is the BOMB. Completely free and open source, it's kind of a one-trick pony in that it only makes plants, but it completely changed everything concerning the plants for my current project. It took about 30 minutes to figure it out, and it has some things that could be better, but what do you want - it's free!
You have to provide textures, and it only supports TGA format. You can then export to OBJ and import into 3DS or Maya and then substitute any other texture format until your heart's content. NG Plant also has Spherical and Cylindrical Billboarding capabilities, so you can get a good preview of what your billboarded canopies and flowers might look like.
http://ngplant.sourceforge.net/
Anyways good tutoiral, favorited!