Should I learn to make trees, or is Speedtree phasing out the need for it?

shearer157

Hi,
As an undergrad I'm still trying to find out a lot of things about industry, and one of my biggest technical questions is about trees. I've seen gta/ the witcher 3 use Speedtree; is it the gaming standard for trees? Has it phased out the need for artists to create them in titles?
Should I bother learning to make them or just learn how to use Speedtree?
Cheers in advance

Eric Chadwick

Learn how. Speedtree requires a license fee, so is not used in all games, not even the majority I would imagine. Also the skills you will learn will carry over to many other game art tasks.

I put some resources here on our wiki
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage

wirrexx

Learning is always better. It just gives you a better understanding!

shearer157

TIL polycount has a wiki. Awesome. Thank you, I'll give them a shot. They are so difficult to make them well! Damn you Witcher 3 and your beautiful waving branches.

mattyinthesun

Yes, you should. Even with SpeedTree there is a lot of cleanup and some remodelling to do - I create trees using ZBrush, Maya and SpeedTree - all are good for different things. Most important thing really is to deeply analyse the structure and design of trees

sprunghunt

Speedtree isn't actually that fast to render as the geometry isn't that efficient. A hand modeled tree will render as fast as a speedtree as long as it has LODs.

loggie24

For movies and such were optimization isn't a big deal SpeedTree would definitely be a good choice, for games on the other hand i would go with the hand modeling process simply because you have a bit more freedom. You will most likely need to re touch what comes out of SpeedTree anyways, and as people have already stated since trees are in general one of the harder things to make properly, once you know how to other things will become easier (at least in my experience).

Joost

Speedtree is good if you have a lot of money and you want quick usable results. But nothing can beat a good artist imo. Not yet anyway

There's several examples on Polycount of people creating amazing foliage which looks much better than anything made with Speedtree, in my opinion.

shearer157

Thanks guys this has been very useful, I appreciate everything. I'm gonna learn to make my own trees. Wish me luck!

jonas_molgaard

Just came accross this thread because i was wondering the same thing. I looked at SpeedTree, and was immediately bummed out by the pricing. So i was wondering too if people still would be using this for games or go for handcrafting them. So i guess i'll also eventually have to learn how to model them myself. In case there are other good alternatives for making good looking trees for games, make sure to let us know.