Hi guys, thanks a bunch for the tutorials. Last night I was physically and mentally exhausted, so I didn't clarify at all what I meant. I am working on a japanese shrine environment, and I am wondering how I could achieve something like this background: http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/23669657.jpg
I was thinking, instead of making a ton of leaves and leaf systems, I could try and attempt to make a roundish spherical-ish form and playing around with a well-done diffuse and Normal map. Of course, I will use some leaf planes, but I wouldn't be using that technique for the entire background.
Depending on how close you plan to allow the player or viewer to get, You could simply try some staggered planes with tree photo's/alphas, similar to how Arch Viz guys do background foliage. Obviously you'd need to play with the size/angles of each but it would be a whole lot quicker than modelling anything.
Alternatively, any of the methods Vig linked would work well too if you do want to have physical tree meshes in the scene.
I have this, which has some great Tree textures along with the relevant alpha maps.
1+ for ZShperes. I do that too, it's just so perfect for making trees. Very easy.
For really realistic, or very detailed ones though, I would have to agree that your best bet is third party soft or scripts. My personal favorite was Treestorm, very realistic branching and dynamics.
For the trees I'll be making, I need to have them animated in a realistic fashion. I agree that 3rd party plugins or scripts would help. But I've tried tree'd, branchy, and various other programs and nothing truly gets the results I want. I had the chance to test out Speedtree with UDK, but since this is going into Max and not unreal (for now), I'm out of luck. What other free (speedtree-ish) programs do you happen to know of?
Replies
Brute modeling:
Polyboost/graphite modeling tools > Branch tool
Or, Sketchxtrude http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/sketchxtrude-0-95-beta
Scripts and separate apps:
Or, TreeMaker script http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/tree-maker
Or, Branchy http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/branchy
Or, Tree shop http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/tree-shop
Or, SpeedtreeMAX http://www.digimation.com/home/Software.aspx?sm=st
Or, SpeedTree http://www.speedtree.com/
Or, TreeStorm http://www.onyxtree.com/stormx.html
Or, Dryad http://dryad.stanford.edu/
Or, XFrog http://www.xfrogdownloads.com/greenwebNew/news/newStart.htm
Or http://www.treegenerator.com/
Thats friggen hilarious ;D
Personally, I like to use Zbrush with zSpheres and then crunch it afterwards.
Basically I was asking "what research have you done so far?" Read this.
I was thinking, instead of making a ton of leaves and leaf systems, I could try and attempt to make a roundish spherical-ish form and playing around with a well-done diffuse and Normal map. Of course, I will use some leaf planes, but I wouldn't be using that technique for the entire background.
What do you think?
Alternatively, any of the methods Vig linked would work well too if you do want to have physical tree meshes in the scene.
I have this, which has some great Tree textures along with the relevant alpha maps.
https://shop.3dtotal.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=194&osCsid=s1ikhqdicb2tink3e905pk4c12
Anything for maya ??
You can also check creativecrash.com for scripts I'm sure they're around but I have never used any of them.
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/c/search?search=tree&x=33&y=15
For really realistic, or very detailed ones though, I would have to agree that your best bet is third party soft or scripts. My personal favorite was Treestorm, very realistic branching and dynamics.