A low poly tree

Jimmy

I've been searching around a lot on the Internet and I haven't been able to find any good tutorials or information about low poly trees. I found a few tutorials, but I guess some were pretty old and the trees were really ugly or the tutorials were about high poly trees...

I've made this tree during de last days and I think it starting to look ok. But I have no idea if my use of polygons on the trunk and branches versus the planes for leaves are acceptable. I know "it depends", but I'm just curious if someone here have good experience and could give me some tips.

Total polycount is 527 and 56 of them belongs to the 28 leaf-planes. This is not a tree for a forest, instead I'm thinking of a single tree by a street i a city.

Rick Stirling

Wires are needed if you want us to critique the use of polygons.

Jimmy

Of course, my wires... And here is also the texture I made for the leaves, if it could use some improvement?

I guess it's not so easy to see exactly what I've done, but I put a plane at the end of each branch and filled up some other empty areas with a few more planes.

Neox

If you could, try to use vertex colors to dim the leaves near the center of the treetop.
Oh and i'd remove that nasty seam alon the trunk.

Jimmy

I'm aware of the seam on the trunk. I will take care of it later today. Using vertex colors sounds interesting, but I don't know if I should use it on this model. This is a part of an art test for a job application (This is the other part) and here are the instructions: "The tree should look good without using alphablend and should be fully modeled with branches, stem etc, be clever about it! Standard max shader with diffuse texture(s) with alpha is enough."

Rick Stirling

Want to be really clever? Do several mix and match variations of trunk and leaves, like a tree pack. Loading that one tree into memory will give you a lot of variation.

You could also model a second tree that uses an identical UV layout (hey, planes are easy!).

You could texture the tree for summer and autumn.

See what I'm getting at here? With very little extra work you end up with a lot of variation. Gamers like variation, game engines like low memory usage.

Ryno

I would thicken the 2d branches/stems on the leaf pane texture. As it stands now, they are quite thin, and will mip down to nothing. Right now, some of the leaves appear to be floating with no connection to the tree, and with mipping they may end up even worse.

Using vertex coloring to get more volume and shading is a good idea, and it's too bad that they don't want you to do that for the art test. It really can improve the look and believability of trees. You might want to do a slight gradient darkening overlay over your leaf texture, so that they get just a little darker toward the trunk. Leaves farther in will tend to be shaded by leaves above them. This can help with making the tree have better volume, and avoid the fullbright look to them quite so much.

Other than that, the seam needs to be addressed, obviously. Also, it's good to know where players will be able to see the tree from. The tree holds up pretty well from this angle, but might a player be able to walk right under it and look up? If so, you've got to watch out for just doing X-card leaf clumps oriented vertically. You may want to angle a few cards at a 45 degree, sloping up away from the trunk.

Jimmy

That's a good tip Rick. I might do a few versions of this tree for my own portfolio, but I haven't got the time to do it for this job application.

Ryno: I will try some gradient darkening on my texture and maybe thickening the branches to. If you're under it and look up, it looks rather terrible. But this company only makes racing-games, so I think it's acceptable in this case. No peeking under the tree, only fast drive by...

Ryno

Sounds good. As long as it's not a rally track where the trees are hanging over the road