Tree branches

Striff

Hey guys, I was curious as to some of you approached making the branches for trees. I have the base model of the tree down, but I am a little stumped on how to make the branches.

Obiously it's going to be alpha mapped, but how do some of you go about making the color map (Do you paint them, take it from photos, etc)? I have tried finding some photos on the internet and editing them to my liking, but bleh - the result is less then stellar.

How do some of your make your tree branches?

MoP

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stumped on how to make the branches

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puntastic!

last time I did branches on alpha planes, I used a mix of photo and traditional painting (about 25% photo, the rest painted)... I started just with a really dark brown base and painted the alpha map completely to my liking initially, then edited and painted the colour map to follow that.

Thegodzero

next gen or current gen? If you want swanking looking normal mappd trees then make a leaf in 3d say 500 polys should do fine. Then clone it 3-4 times and find a nice leafy texture modify it so you have 3-4 sligtly diffrent textures to give the look of them beening real and drop it on them.

Now comes the part where you can choose what type of method you want to do for your trees.

One type has the branches on the same map as the leafs and the other way has you make two textures one of just leafs and one of just branches. The two textures way lets you intersect the two planes to make it look fuller or lets you use the leafs as billboards that will always face the player. This is how speed tree does it and old games always did it.

If you go the second way you just rotate the leaves you made slightly and bed them a bit and randomely scatter them about over a plane so that when you render to texture youl get a good amount of random lighting comming off each leaf. Then once thats done make some basic branch shapes and throw on some bark texture and render to texture.

Thats how you can make some quick swanky three textures in no time at all that will look as good as speed tree if not better because then you get to design the tress form.