Great Tutorial on building a low poly tree

[Goldensly]

heh, for the love of me I always have the hardest time making trees. Anywho, while searching around to see if I could find a tutorial that could help fix my issue I came across this tutorial

http://www.vimeo.com/2746030 Part 1 of 5.

Very helpful tutorial. Its blender based but method translates well to maya.
Hopefully this comes in handy for others as well :)

[rburke]

Ah blender, that's the program i started on back in 2000 2001, it is really great and has only gotten better, one of the best open source projects ever. Besides that the tree tutorial is pretty good, and i have one other way that works good for tree in maya too.


i know it might seem generic but paintFX is very powerful for this.

choose a basic tree from the visor, nothing too fancy. Draw the tree and then get into the stroke properties/tree properties etc. Its like a huge endless list of variables. Just adjust the ones related to branching and what not. I usually try to make a tree with a single trunk and maybe 2 sub branch groups. you can use spline curves in this control section, to adjust all of this so you get tapers towards the tips or bends toward the tips or even at the base etc play with these till it looks good. it will take a bit but you can get so many more variations than you could with plain modeling. once you have results you like, just select the tree, and go to convert>convert paintfx to polygons. in the options set it to quad output, so you get all quads, and then choose hide strokes so it gets rid of the old tree. and set you poly limit, you need to experiment with that though because the poly count will affect how easy this is to weld up. you can even transfer vertex color if you want to.
anyways after transfer you can just leave it as intersecting meshes, which usually looks fine because you wont see it. But if it must be welded then just do it like shown in the video etc.
What is cool about this is the ability to make a wide array of plant types based on a procedural method, and then do modeling cleanup.
and if you want to quickly texture then use a tiling bark texture, and just unitize the uv's and you'll get pretty good results. If you need some more shading in the tree use as econ uv set to do a light map or an ao map or something, or just bring it into unreal and do that there etc. But its much easier to texture a tree using a unitized texture then it is painting one. Although modo makes painting trees pretty easy.

and if you like i can go into how to make branches and leaves and grass alphas using paintFX as well.

[Goldensly]

Sure, I'm always up for learning as many different ways of getting things done. I'd appreciate hearing about your method for branches and leaves. :)

[rburke]

Sure, I'm always up for learning as many different ways of getting things done. I'd appreciate hearing about your method for branches and leaves. :)

k im gonna keep this way short cause i need to formulate a proper tutorial, but this should get you started.

open the visor to browse stuff, and also hit 8 in your viewport to go to paint effects canvas.

now choose something like a tree, and try painting with it a bit just a small stroke

now adjust the settings over and over and over until you are starting to get the result you want in terms of a branch, you can turn leaves of etc or have it add little blossom whatever you want there is a million combos, plus you can reference your own objects if your clever.
anyways use a pen tablet for this, as paint fx is pressure sensitive and that will change how your branches form. experiment brushing up and down and sideways they will allmake different results as there is effectors like gravity etc.

once you get the hang of it.

set your canvas size to the desired output resolution (using the Canvas> set size menu in the viewport border. i just use something really big to start like a 2k or something even though im scaling it down id rather have more detail available if i need it. now zoom out so you can see the whole canvas on the scene, this will help as you will be aware of where the edges of your texture are etc.

k paint away till you got a few branches you like.

now
got to the menu paint> save snapshot, and output to whatever format, i just use the .iff format as its maya native and photoshop can also save in this format and its super fast for maya to use .iff for alphas.

so this will give you your color map but what about the transparency mask.
well that is so easy thats why this is great, at the top of the viewport, click the little white circles in the black square this will put the canvas in alpha mode, now you have your mask, just do the save snapshot and you have a nice black and white transparency mask.

and now just do your photoshop magic, then bring them into maya and make a few planes from them and place them on tree and done.

this same thing is great for grass too, and also some types of hair or fur, and even other random stuff. i once used it to create veins for an eyeball by using branches with a bunch of gravity and a red color they all went down like roots so they ended up looking just like veins.

and finally there is an option to save canvas to file, it works just like snapshot, and allows different formats i believe, ive used both, and i cant quite remember the difference off the top of my head.

hope this helps its a very useful tool.