Tree Quickies

Makkon

I was playing around with alpha maps for the first time last week and pulled a few of these out. They're fast and easy, and look rather decent. The textures are just basic photo sourcing from my own photos and a number of web images. The leaves and branches are just a tree texture and alpha duplicated a number of times over a simple tree skeleton. It works well if you pick the right texture and structure it properly.





I've taken a recent liking to environment art and am interested in seeing some more small projects by other people. Post your own stuff and explain your little trick to getting your look.

EarthQuake

this especially looks very good(bottom much more than the top) are you rendering these with shadows, or using some vertex lighting or something?

zenarion

stupid as it sounds, would you release the source models on addondb.com? for game modders to use to quickly fill their maps. would be really nice to see some quality trees there once in a while

Jaco

Nice trees man, how long does it take you to do one similar to the first one?

Black_Dog

Those look great. I think half of it is having different lighting on two sides of a branch quad - but won't that require doubling the geometry in a realtime engine?

Makkon

Per128: Damn strait

EarthQuake: I just threw some quick directional lights in there to simulate the lighting you might get in game. These are screencaps, I'm no good a rendering.

zenarion: Probably a good idea, but I wanted to use them in one of my own maps first, actually. However, if I don't end up using them I will release them. Addondb is like a sister site to moddb, right? Havn't been there yet.

Jaco: Each one only takes about 10 to 15 minutes. Once you have the texture put together, you have a lot of creative freedom.

Black_Dog: That's true, with some engines you would have to do that, doubling the polycount in seconds. However, I think some engines, like source, actually support double sided geometry.... I think.

Few tips- The texture can take about 30 mins to an hour, depending on how lucky you are to find what you need. You have to do a lot of photo editing and a whole lot of quick masking to get the alpha (the hardest part, guh) but it's worth the work because it can be reused again and again.



Of course, painting the alpha for the tree is close to impossible, so unless the contrast of background and foreground are just right, or if you know a clever trick, you'll get the best results grabbing something from Google. http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=tree+alpha&btnG=Search+Images

EricElwell

I really like these! The vines threw me for a loop when I saw these on the other thread. Had to take a closer look to see what was going on there. I like them a lot! I'll have to give this a go at some point.

Makkon

Oh, they're so easy to make, I'll get you the recipe.
Here's an archive of free tree textures. Some of the photos have the right conditions to make a good alpha map, specifically the ones with the dull gray sky in the back.
http://free-textures.got3d.com/natural/free-tree-textures/index.html

EDIT:
Playing around with some different structures. This stuff is a blast!

Joshua Stubbles

I hate making trees/bushes

Those look mighty nice though. gj

Jeremy Lindstrom

lets see some wires..

warby

-definitely digg the multi layer trunk
-but the shape of the leaves them selfs doesn't talk to me too wowy

rooster

looks cool man, I'd consider trimming off or joining up the floaty bits that arent connected in the alpha. it always looks weird if you get up close and theres some floating leaves/specks
edit: thats only really noticable in the last pic btw most are spot on

Mark Dygert

Looking good, they remind me of trees in WoW only better

I would suggest not using black as the background color for the leaves but something more like an ambient green. That way you won't get any weird black pixels if your mask is off by a little bit.

Justin Meisse

Groovy, thanks for the tree images, I'm going to have a go at it probably tomorrow or wednesday

tokidokizenzen

Thanks Makkon, I'm working on a tree right now and trying to figure out the best way to tackle the leaves/branches.

Thegodzero

makkon, they look good, too bad trees that look good with last gen techniques look like shit in next gen engines. Your last example was the very same way i tried to make a bush, but with the way things get lit now it was painfull to look at in game. Next gen for plants makes me a sad panda sometimes.

In other words long live the last gen arts!

Mark Dygert

Those are looking nice!

Two scripts that help generate trees.

TreeMaker 5.0 and MaxTree 1.1. On there own they make some pretty decent base meshes to start from. I prefer to use TreeMaker more than MaxTree but I toss it out there because it is more set up for the crazy kind of trees you have.

I also suggest using the Advanced Painter script to place trees around your environment. Click > perfectly aligned tree, click + drag > perfectly aligned row of trees, very easy to use and saves a bunch of time.

Eric Chadwick

Hey Vig I have some love for Adv Painter too. I find it odd that it doesn't have Min/Max Scale spinners though... I end up having to use Blur's RandomTransform afterwards.

MoP

Nice trees here, Makkon. Sometimes your alpha planes are a bit too obvious though, maybe try moving some verts around more randomly to break up the silhouette.

Tad derailing here, but have you tried MousePlanter, Eric?
Seems to have rotation and scaling, unless you're needing to do a ton of objects randomly instead of placing/rotating/scaling each one in turn.

Mark Dygert

MoP, I would have your childern... if things worked that way. They don't so I'll just thank you for the link to the script.

I'm writing an email to both authors to see if one or both of them can't smash both scripts together to make something beautiful. /crosses fingers

I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread