By Andrew Ferguson (62.252.64.5) on Tuesday, July 24, 2001 - 01:00 pm:

How to create lots but slightly different trees to make up a forrest also Im having trouble making the tree look good (damn leaves)

By Dave (207.212.70.25) on Tuesday, July 24, 2001 - 01:16 pm:

A program called X-Frog is nice for making 3D trees and foilage. (http://www.greenworks.de/)

Also I have used Sasquatch for leaves

By Andrew Ferguson (62.252.64.5) on Tuesday, July 24, 2001 - 01:18 pm:

Whats the best way to integrate these trees into lightwave?

By mike rb (216.232.166.145) on Tuesday, July 24, 2001 - 01:26 pm:

http://www.joealter.com

take a look at a product called shave, and a feature called instancing.

It'll run you 485$ though

Mike

By Larry Shultz (Spline_God) (206.111.21.182) on Tuesday, July 24, 2001 - 01:50 pm:

You need to create trees for 3 different areas. Close the camera, medium distance from the camera and far from the camera. The only place you need very detailed trees are close up. The rest can be faked in a number of ways including single polys with clip maps.

By Earl Wilson IV (Earl) (65.4.45.176) on Tuesday, July 24, 2001 - 05:35 pm:

Agreed...work on ways to simulate trees at different distances from the camera. Sasquatch seems to be a great solution for faking leaves at a medium distance. Up close is the toughest, because in order to make the trees as detailed as they are in life, you're going to need a LOT of computer power to back you up. The only true way to get a tree to look good up close (in my opinion) is to add as much detail as any tree has. Model it piece by piece as a tree outside your window. Just try to keep the polygon count reasonable...which is tough.

By Earl Wilson IV (Earl) (65.4.45.176) on Tuesday, July 24, 2001 - 05:39 pm:

Oh, and here's a link to a tutorial on leaves/trees using the Sasquatch plugin. I know, most people would like to be able to get by without expensive plugins...but some of them, like Sasquatch, are just worth it.

By Larry Shultz (Splinegod) (24.165.88.67) on Wednesday, July 25, 2001 - 12:14 am:

You can certainly do this without sasquatch. There are a variety of plugins that come with lightwave or are free that will scatter objects like trees around.

By Earl Wilson IV (Earl) (65.4.45.176) on Wednesday, July 25, 2001 - 12:45 am:

Hmmm...you know, even when I went back to post the link, I forgot to post the link. How pathetic.

Link to Sasquatch Tutorial:
http://balo.com/tutortree01.shtml

And yeah, I'd agree Larry. There are so many different approaches to leaves and trees...I just thought the Sasquatch one had decent results. Many trees and bushes look very stale, cold, and artificial. It's refreshing to see more varieties now...

By Ferguson (62.252.64.5) on Wednesday, July 25, 2001 - 11:15 am:

Indeed, many trees I have created look reasonabley realistic but my main problem is creating a thick forrest type look while trying not to have every tree looking indentical plus of course the problem with having millions of polygons from all the trees!

By ian (24.108.209.151) on Wednesday, July 25, 2001 - 01:17 pm:

Ferguson,

I am working on an amimation now where the camera flies over a park full of trees. This is what I did, which turned out really nice. In modeller I create a tesselated sphere. (about a 5) then use array with a whole lot of jitter. Now you have a bank of trees. Next I run the cursor over the trees in a random way. hit "]" to select all the polygons and apply tree surface #1 to them. I repeat this process 3 or 4 times. What I'm left with is a bunch of random spheres with 3 or 4 different tree textures applied to them randomly.

next, use the jitter function on the points. This allows the trees to become unique. After this smooth, with an iteration of about 5. Do this a couple times and your trees will take on a really random, treelike pattern.

next, select the geometry for the tree#1 texture, stretch them to make them slightly taller. tree#2 shorter, etc. So that all four different textured object sets are slightly different hieghts.

NOTE: this is good for a bunch of non-coniferous trees. If you need pine (etc.) type trees just mix in a bunch of cones in step one. Make sure the cones are a much darker green.

Ok, Next. When you texture them.
-procedural - noise - bump. very fine. (looks like little leaves)
-procedural - crumple (I think) fine. adds the clumpy, puffy parts to the trees. play with the scale until it looks treelike.
-apply the edge transparency shader. (most likely about .8 or .9)
-procedural - noise - colour very fine. different shades of green.
-procedural - turbulance - medium. different shades of green, with a tint of brown. Adds general differences to the bank of trees.
fiddle with the textures untill they render treelike.
-procedural - copy the bump channel into the transparency channel.
-add about 20% of specular at about 20% size.

that should do it. now you will have to mess with the parameters to fine tune the 'treeness' of it all.

Another trick is after you have all of your trees, and a 'ground' take a top-down screenshot and paint a matching bitmap for the ground. make sure you add brownish areas under the treed areas, since in a forest it's often less green under the trees.

Using this technique I have created a forest of trees consisting of only a few thousand polys that at DV resolution renders in about 3 minutes/ frame (that is with a whole city full of reflective buildings too)

good luck.

ian

By Jack Cottle (Jack) (65.33.166.157) on Wednesday, July 25, 2001 - 04:38 pm:

Hi Ian,

could you post a still of your forest to help me get an idea what it should look like? Thanks

By ian (24.108.209.151) on Wednesday, July 25, 2001 - 07:57 pm:

sure thing

My rendering machine is tied up until tomorrow. I'll post some samples tomorrow.

ian

By ian (24.108.209.151) on Thursday, July 26, 2001 - 03:11 pm:

Ok,

the trees in this animation obviously don't play a critical role, more filling out the landscape.




cheers

ian

By Hunter (64.156.200.211) on Thursday, July 26, 2001 - 03:26 pm:

There's a plugin @ flay called forest. not great trees but pretty good at a distance.