Tree making fast technique?
polycounter lvl 14
Hello is there a fast tree making technique? so far I am making a cylinder then I extrude parts and move vertices arond , quite a long and tediouse work when I shoudl just have a base tree and eventually with a seed get the good variations , I know of natfx ,tried the demo and I dont like it .... I tried the demo of speedtree ok it creates stuff that requires speedtree to work so excluded and finally I tried treemaker demo , and makes stuff not at all like what I would like to , so I wonder if there is may be a workflow that could help me improve and make faster the production of severall tree shapes ...
Thanks for any help
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Thanks for any help
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Replies
What Rhinokey said. There are a multitude of tree generators out there, and for my current environment, I used one. But I was *not* getting the results I wanted, so I started back from scratch and made it myself.
If time is not an option however, it's like I said, there are a ton of programs out there. I started a thread about this a while back. Don't be afraid to use the search function! Some programs are free, some aren't. So go check them out and see which one suits your needs!
I started with a spline, lofted a cylinder up the spline and then manually cut into the cylinder and extruded branches, and then further branches from them. It was time consuming, but I then had a decent base mesh to take into Mudbox. I then sculpted it, retopologized, and unwrapped it.
Took about a day though so it's probably not what you're looking for. Just wanted to share a workflow idea with you.
I love being an environment artist!
- grab all the ref you can
- we then create a zsphere sketch in zbrush creating the form and bulk etc which is signed off
- retopo and and unwrap the base mesh and begin your sculpting
- then we use a particle system to spawn the leaves on the areas of the tree we want them to appear on.
Simples!
This is a good tut, for Maya but easily done in other apps too.
http://www.andyzibits.com/tut_maya_low_poly.html
was just reiterating what rhinokey was saying - environment art is just like character art, you have to put the time in.
guess i made it too nice looking!
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/trees/
+1
I literally just got into Speedtree for the first time the other day and it is actually pretty easy to get some great looking results.
The version that comes with UDK is pretty well stocked in terms of the texture files included too so you should get some nice results pretty quickly.
Check out these tuts, they're fairly short and to the point:
[ame]
Two benefits of using Speedtree if you plan to use your trees in UDK are that firstly, you can have them affected by wind so they sway (as much or as little as you want) in the wind, and you can also add them to a DecoLayer so you can place a lot with size/rotation variation very quickly.
EDIT:
I'm not sure if it's possible but you may be able to export the trees you create as OBJ's or similar so you can unwrap/texture using your own textures rather than Speedtree's.
Max has AEC Foliage but it's just too much mesh. And the leaves float too much anyhow.
Are you running Windows 7? I had to replace a DLL to get Speedtree to work, previously it would just open and crash/lockup on opening.
There's a thread with the DLL link here:
http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=705766&page=7
Apparently it still isn't fixed with the latest UDK, but the DLL fix still works.
I was always curious as to the quality of Speedtree but I was pleasantly surprised. I don't really see how you couldn't get unique looking trees, even with 2 minutes of effort tweaking the settings for tree components can change things drastically enough that you get some decent results.
While making the stump/branches in a 3D package isn't much of a challenge, it's the placing of all the alpha planes that takes time I find. If you want a group of 10 or so tree variations to scatter around your scene, thats gonna take a long time compared to the matter of minutes in Speedtree.
I guess it comes down to what your requirements are... a few trees which may be a focal point in a final image would benefit far more from being hand-modelled and textured individually but for a jungle or dense forest, I'd happily use Speedtree I think.
What is this?
it was a joke,
and why i see using tree generators could be beneficial, i would suggest not using shortcuts like that as a crutch, if you are slow or have trouble modeling trees, then you should practice at them. even if there is a program that shits out nice trees at the touch of a button, it never hurts to know how to do them from scratch
Also the various painting systems like object painter really help with placing leaves and so on.
I also don't get the obsession with each tree being unique. You can usually make a very good looking forest with only a few tree variants as long as you make them look different from different angles.
I usually create trunk and basic branches using splines and then modify them to what I want to look like..
so far my results was always really good! but for placing leaves it did not ever even looked like what I want them to be!
I tried many ways..
instance model painting
placing them one by one!
and the final way which I think should be the best way available is to use particle system.
define leaves as particles, put them on trunk and branches(as particle source) and modify positions, direction, scale and ...
as I told you this way is the best way I could find, but I didn't get my ideal results yet.. they are just better than my previous tries..
sometime I will write a script to create lowpoly trees! (don't wait for it soon!)
Its for Crysis and I dunno if is too much lowpoly to look too skinny or not ....
its handmodeled from base to leaves .... problem is I have to make tons of those and all different , and I was looking for a faster way that could help making the right shape ....
what you think?
Have you seen the actual tree button in 3dsmax? they're under create>AEC extended>foilage
they're very high poly though. And don't look that great.
The trick is in getting the flat foliage planes to light well. Bending/aligning the vertex normals helps a lot. Speedtree does a neato trick with dynamic vertex color, darkening the sprites relative to the light angle and distance from the center of the tree (or something like that).
Create cilinder and a uvmap and texture it ....
create severall splines and apply deform path to the cilinders and clones of it severall times
taper a bit the cilinders and so u have severall branches
If you preplace severall planes of leaves on each branch u have branches ready
then I guess you can rearrange them in several positions and reorentations and deforminb the base central trunk u can have further shapes , then eventually merge the base of each branch in the trunk base model ...
I don't know if this still works, but it was really cool when I tried it awhile back.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/tree-maker
But otherwise your tree looks nice and will look good in CryEngine.
http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/403/pianta.jpg
I tried that , but then it is a nightmere to texture ...
Been playing with the Speedtree modeler that comes with UDK, it's pretty sweet. I can get a very nice tree very quickly by fiddling around with the settings. But... export is disabled unless I have a Speedtree license. Besides, I doubt that I could use the model in a different commercial product without a license. Would be cheating quite a bit, even if I used my own textures.
http://www.branches.ws
Also played around with a cool little script called Normal Thief. It projects vertex normals from one mesh to another (from the red mesh to my leaves). Super slow, like 1-2 seconds per vertex! But the results are really cool, as long as your game supports edited vertex normals.
Pretty good, for totally free tools.
Oh, and the tree is only 672 triangles!
Here is instead my technique I am trying to use ... that way I can have pretextured fast one cylinder and just clone around getting severall branches shapes by using severall splines may be I can even preadd some bunches of leaves on it ....
What you think of this tech ?
The tree I made is not a finished piece really, but the script looks like it could really automate a lot of the time-consuming parts. Under the good it uses a particle system to generate the leaves, pretty quick to edit. Just have to face-map them to get decent UVs.
How that works?
My image shows the difference between default vertex normals (left side trees) and edited vertex normals (right side trees). I like the lighting on the right side better. Not sure if Crysis supports this, actually I kind of doubt it. Some info here about their vegetation shading (section 16.2.1):
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch16.html
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?p=1021264
http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryEnvironment#EF
This technique would only work for a game engine that supports edited vertex normals. UDK doesn't as far as I know. CryEngine has their own foliage shading system, so it might not support custom vertex normals out of Max. Something to test I guess.
Hope this helps!
You seem to be using CryEngine so it shouldn't be an issue as Eric stated, but I thought I'd say it anyways, as you seem a bit confused on the matter.
Also, I'm really shocked about some of the big engines not supporting custom normals being exported. What the fuck?
np MightyPea. There's a lot you can do with vert normals, but like Vassago says sometimes it's a conscious decision to forego lighting altogether. Still, it helps to make the case for an artist feature I want, since a coder might not see the cost/benefit ratio for spending their time on implementing it.
NAIMA if you want more info about it, lemme know.