First tree: Looking for tips! (Virginia Green Ash Tree)

3DLee

Hey Polycount! I'm finally less than two months away from graduating with my degree in visual communication arts, and I'm ready to get back into improving my 3D work. I'll be buying up a lot of software before I graduate, but for now I decided to work on creating my first tree.

I chose the Green Ash tree which is found all over my hometown. I wasn't able to find an eye-catching image to source from, so I used a good number of images as inspiration. I also studied Michael Betke's low-poly trees as I've always been impressed with his vegetation.

I'm looking for tips from those of you that are much more experienced with vegetation than I am. What did I do wrong, and what can I improve on?

Here's what I have:






The bark is 90% photo sourced, but a lot of the branches/leaves are illustrated.



Normal, diffuse, alpha



Normal, diffuse, spec

All of the background vegetation (pine trees, etc) were created by Michael Betke.









I also recorded a quick video to show the animation. It's all done with a Leadwerks vertex shader on the branch texture.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQzxO0IXzuM[/ame]

MainManiac

Great job

3DLee

Hey, thanks guys. Super Happy Cow, would you happen to have a link to a tutorial about normal masking the leaves?

vcortis

Pretty solid stuff! I have some small crits...

1. Add a bit more mesh detail at the base of the tree where it plops into the ground. Flare it a bit more and add some hints of a root structure. Just break up the cylindrical silhouette of the trunk a bit. We call it popcicle syndrome.

It may in fact be how that tree is (cylindrical) in real life, but in games sometimes you have to stretch the truth for things to look believable.

2. Add some nice color variation in the leaf texture. Just drop some red/browns/purples/yellows etc. over the top and apply a blur. Then switch it to a color overlay and drop the opacity down.

3. Add a few more larger branches in the canopy.

4. As anyone knows trees need LODs! Create a version of this tree that is under 1k tris meant to be viewed at far distances.

Good job!

3DLee

vcortis wrote: »

Pretty solid stuff! I have some small crits...

1. Add a bit more mesh detail at the base of the tree where it plops into the ground. Flare it a bit more and add some hints of a root structure. Just break up the cylindrical silhouette of the trunk a bit. We call it popcicle syndrome.

It may in fact be how that tree is (cylindrical) in real life, but in games sometimes you have to stretch the truth for things to look believable.

2. Add some nice color variation in the leaf texture. Just drop some red/browns/purples/yellows etc. over the top and apply a blur. Then switch it to a color overlay and drop the opacity down.

3. Add a few more larger branches in the canopy.

4. As anyone knows trees need LODs! Create a version of this tree that is under 1k tris meant to be viewed at far distances.

Good job!

Great tips vcortis!

I started off by adding more color (yellows, browns, and purples) to my leaves:


I then cleaned up the UV mapping on my tree trunks, added a few smaller branches and flared out the base of the tree:



Here a few shots of the updated package in-game:







Next up: LODs!

marq4porsche

Your textures are looking great! For the model itself you can loose some of the unnecessary edge loops when you get higher up, it'll save you polys that can be used to add extra branches and such. You can make the trunk thinner as it rises as well because it looks too thick at medium height. Also don't be afraid to spread out those branches and make the tree fuller. It doesn't look as wide as it should be. Look at this example to see what I mean. Great progress man, I'd love to see more.

MainManiac

Did you put all of the branch image planes on by hand?

Sean VanGorder

Looking nice man. I'll reference this when I attempt some trees in the near future.

3DLee

Thanks!

@frell, I did place all of these by hand, but I kept wondering... there must be a more efficient way. I'm not sure though.

@marq4porsche - I can remove edge loops by just selecting them and hitting Backspace, correct? Is there a way to lower the amount of loops without re-drawing the shape?

As far as the shape of the tree goes, yes it is kinda skinny, but this was by design. I'm planning on making a few more of these, and one of the next ones will be more "full".

The LODs are going well, and once they're finished I'm going to try and get this tree working with the Leadwerks vegetation system. That way, billboards will be automatically created and I can "paint" a full forest.

marq4porsche

I don't work in Max so you need to get some clarification on that by someone who does, is there a collapse tool in Max? If so you can just collapse every other edge ring.

Sean VanGorder

You can remove loops by selecting them and hitting Ctrl + Backspace. This removes the edges AND the vertices. Just hitting Backspace will remove the loops, but will leave the vertices.

marq4porsche - Yeah, there is a Collapse tool in Max.

3DLee

Ah-ha, collapse was the word I was looking for! I'm working on collapsing vertices on the higher areas of the trunk sections:



Eventually I'll get it down to a 3-sided cylinder at the top.

I also took a blind stab at tweaking the normals for the leaves like Super Happy Cow suggested. The results look good in the Crazy Bump preview window, but it isn't really noticeable in-game. I even maxed out the intensity of the map... I wonder if this is just an issue with the Leadwerks "mesh_diffuse_bumpmap_alphatest.frag" shader? Perhaps the alpha testing is over-powering the normal bump?

Serp

I guess you good try upping the specular to see what happens with the normal map. Or adding a specular map

snow

read through the entire post and either i'm stupid and have completely missed it but - real time in what? XD

marq4porsche

He's using the Leadwerks engine.

Cordell Felix

That looks great man!
I'm going to be making a tree soon myself...I'll use this as reference on building it.
Thank you for sharing!

3DLee

Glad you guys are finding this useful! It's all new territory for me, so I'm kind of thinking out loud.

I've made improvements to the specular map and the overall material for the leaves (it wasn't even loading the spec in at all before). I'll post more on that when I make more progress, but for now here's a quick blurb I shared over on the Leadwerks forums about how I painted the tree branches:

I actually drew the base of the branches using the Pen tool in Photoshop and stroke'd it with a hard brush. I then pinched the ends of the branches and added noise and an artistic filter:



From there I added a photo-sourced bark texture overlay and tweaked it:



Finally I used some selection set trickery to shade just the outer edges of the branches to give them some depth/roundness:

Zipfinator

That's basically how I do my branches for leaves too. I paint the branch using my Wacom, use that as a mask over the bark texture that I use on the trunk and then use a Bevel and Emboss FX to give it the slight roundness/highlight to give it some depth.

Your tree is looking nice though. Much better than my first tree was. If your engine supports Explicit Vertex Normals you may want to look into the Max script SlideNormalThief. There's a thread about it somewhere here on Polycount that shouldn't be too hard to find and there's an article about it on the Polycount Wiki here.

3DLee

Thanks for the link Zipfinator, I completely forgot to check out what the Wiki had to offer. I haven't had a ton of time to work on this little project in the last few weeks but I have gotten some research and experimentation with normals done.

I've also been working on some additional models (the largest tree is not yet finished):





Wires for the medium tree:



Wires for the small tree:



Has anyone had trouble getting Slide's Normal Thief to work? The original works ok in Max 2009/2012, but Slide's version does not show up at all when I load the script in 2009 or 2012.

Also, am I doing this right? I used a cube as my reference object because I wasn't sure what I needed to use. The results were... well, nothing really changed in game, but you can see it in Max here:

yodude87

good job.

just putting my two cents. but why dont you show some roots? the way its attached to the ground right now seems as if its gonna fall at my head :P

stick some pieces of root from the floor around the main piece. take a look at some reference pics, and consider that your tree is quite high; the higher the tree, the thicker/bigger/deeper the roots.

divi

try it with a roughly fitting sphere or maybe metaballs.
will only work in engine if the engine supports custom normals.
nice progress overall

nordahl154

Never done trees before. Do your big branches intersect with the base cylinder, or is it connected vert to vert so it's seamless?

Also, fantastic job! Makes me want to make my first tree.

Zipfinator

The engine needs to support explicit vertex normals for that to work in game. Guess you should ask whoever does that engine if it works. The only engine I know it works in is UDK.

3DLee

B-b-bump! I'm all graduated now so I'm sinking my teeth back into 3D projects. I never got vertex normals working but I have just about finished the final large tree model:





I also noticed a nasty texture alpha issue where the thin tree branches were being made transparent because of how thin their alpha was. I used a refined selection set in Photoshop to widen the alpha on the branches to great effect:

ParoXum

I've only seen this topic now, but there's something you've been doing since the start:

Too much foliage in your texture, leaf density is making your alpha cards very obvious.

Also it seems your tree is very generic looking in the branches and silhouette. Maybe you should copy some refs just for branches placement.

Also, the repeating leaf pattern in your texture could be replaced by more various placements giving more variety from up close (tho this works okay atm).

3DLee

In the future would it be more efficient to model some smaller branches and leave the texture for mainly the leaves (no pun intended hah) or should I create a separate texture for the branches with their own cards?