Making 3D plants, bushes, grass

Loren Broach

Well HI!

I looked and couldn't find a thread on this, but please link me to it if there is one. I've been struggling with trying to make nice looking plants and bushes. Cheap ones that are 20 or so polys. Anyone know of any tutorials or can give me some tips?

Thanks!

jocose

This might be of help: http://www.andyzibits.com/tut_low_poly_trees.html

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=356544&highlight=tree+lowpoly

Here is another one: http://www.3dlessons.com/tutorials/Creating-low-poly-foliage-47883.html



Also one tip is to make sure and make things darker towards the inside and lighter towards the outside. More light gets occluded the denser your shrubbery gets so make sure you take that into account when painting your textures.

With stuff that's really low poly it comes down to the texture because your just going to be replicating it as a bunch of billboards. I would make sure and check out some plant painting tutorials as well and get some good pshop brushes.

Also make sure and use a mix of sizes for your cards. You want to focus on building up the silhouette of the object but not wasting a ton of geometry in the process. So use larger cards to define the silhouette and then use lots of smaller cards to fill things in.

Also remember that leaves are not completely opaque so some light does pass through them. This can make the darker interior colors have a green hue. If you are going for something a little more stylized I would recommend using a subtle blue or purple for the darker interior parts. This can contrast nicely with the green of a tree for example.

You can see an example of that in this low poly environment I did a few years ago:



I think that scene was something like 2500 triangles and the trees were only a portion of that. I basically used a single texture on a bunch of polygon cards and then rotated them so that the silhouette held up regardless of what angle you were looking at the tree.

I also used a few polygons for the bottom of the canopy to get the blue color and also to cover up the fact that there were a bunch of cards you could see through. The player would never be able to see the trees from above, only from below so that's why I went that route.

If the player is only going to see the object from a limited angle then that can have a huge impact on how you would build an object like this so make sure and take that into consideration.


Edit: Oh, and Berkly has this really cool library of plants you can look through. Should be able to get lots of ideas from the pics: http://calphotos.berkeley.edu/flora/

Here is another really good reference site for trees: http://www.cirrusimage.com/trees!toc.htm

Celes

3 sided cylinder for trunk, poly plane branches and leaves.
I've always used Maya's Visor/Paint thing and take render images of them to slap on the poly planes