Trees

[efflux]

These are the ways to get trees from my experiments no matter where you're doing them. Certain apps will handle certain parts of this better than others.

The main trunk and basically all the branches need to be seperate geometry or at least it's best that way. My thorny tree doesn't have separate geometry, those branches were extruded from the trunk. For small trees, tha'ts fine but for big trees it's best to have simpler geometry, at least definitely higher up the branching system or WAY too much geometry has to be created. You essentially have cones of mesh. How those cones grow out of previous cone will work in different ways depending on the style of the tree. They could just come out at a fairly sharp angle or you have the bottom face of the cone lined up with an edge ring in the branch it's coming from and the cone bends out gently but is locked at it's base - classically how trunks look. This creates your entire branching structure.

The next problem is that branches are not usually straight so you have to bend them about. It could be a reasonably straight bend up or down (obviously the weeping willow bends down) with maybe some gentle twisting. In many cases the branches need to bend and twist around a lot like that Plant Factor Acacia tree. I'm still looking at the best way to achieve that. I have several ideas but if it's done in your 3D modeller it will depend on it's capabilities. Say if it has paths or whatever. Personally, I think mapping out branch shapes in a path like way first before it becomes polys is the way to go. I'm going to test doing this as svg then importing to Wings.

The last problem is attaching leaves. The leaves positions need to reference geometry points in branches and be bent to different angles and jittered about some. Arbaro obviousdly does this but you don't see it all happeing in a preview because it's massive geometry and too much to handle. It gets heavy work in any 3D app. There also has to be an ability to make the leaves any shape. You can actually do this in Arbaro. You design the tree and the leaves as normal but reference an external geomtry shape for the leaves. I must admit I haven't tried this but I'm assuming it works.

The Wings "put on" tool means attaching say fruits to trees is easily possible. Within reason though. I don't know how many objects it can "put on" without a slow down. Maybe thousands. Wings is not multi core. This is fine for big geometry where small edits are happening (which is what most people are usually doing) but if you apply a giant edit calculation it can take a lot of time and max out a single core for a bit of time. Maybe leaves can be done this way, I've yet to test it.

I've got a stack of stuff in the pipelines to do with several apps and I should be daily adding it all to a website. I need to sort this out. I need my own website.

[efflux]

The ideal way to create leaves would be as arrays but you can't maintain that from one app to another. For example I can make trees with full branches in Wings then one leaf. I can sort out selections of polys to connect leaves to branches. That poly selection can be maintained via materials to Blender. In theory, in Blender I should be able to take than one leaf and array it into thousands of leaves over the tree. This is currently theory though. If that's possible then building giant forrests in Blender would be easy. I already know that Blender will go to huge levels of full tree arrays. Then tree arrays with arrays of leaves i.e. arrays within arrays. I can't operate in such efficient ways in TG2 but TG2 may be better at creating arrays than Blender. I should hope so.

[efflux]

Just another point. Arbaro has one advantage if you just use it's trees straight. It can create seeds so many variants of the same tree. Personally, I think Arbaro does a great job for trees that aren't viewed close up. I think it creates nice natural variations. It's a hugely underused app considering it's free.

Also, Wings has huge selection capability. This is key. You can even select polys using a light. You shine a light on the object and those polys get selected. Then you have random selection of different %. This selection works within a previous selection so you could have extrusions moving towards a light. It's amazing because for example Modo has NO intelligent selection at all apart from basics like edge rings.

[Antoine]

I have done some exportation tests towards Vue, Modo, Blender and Terragen. It seems that tiff formats during exportation are not supported for now in TPF.
Here the first result with Terragen. The only things to do for now are to manually redirect to the alpha image for the leaves, the bump for the trunk texture and some reflectivity correction.

Don't look at the apparence of the tree in itself, It is just a rough one quickly done without proper adjustments, this was just an exportation test.

David. (Antoine is my third name)

[efflux]

One branch created in about 10 seconds. This is the beginning of a new angle. In Inkscape I can draw a bunch of lines, not just one as you see here but fill a page with them. Fractalise them (Inkscape has a bunch of methods to create and distort svg even L-systems). Save and import to Wings which automatically extrudes to polys.Then the second image is tapered in Wings.

Better would be to to have a trunk in the middle and taper at both ends. Then on line become two branches. The line is obviously only fractalised in 2D but that's not bad.

[efflux]

OK. I wasn't going to post but I'll post every so often when I get a new technique in Wings which moves things forward. This one is highly regulated which we don't want that but I'll get into how to jitter things around later. I'm also not posting anything which isn't quick.

The method here was - create a cube, smooth (subdivide) the top. Change to vertex selection, reduce this selection (so it's the central vertex), move this vertex fractionally outwards by normal (to splay the sweep extrude), change to face selection and sweep. Start again and keep doing the same. Once you have enough splits you will need to use select edge by length to get only the short edges. Invert this selection (so you have long edges) then cut the edges and slide to near where the branches join. Repeat this for the other side of the join. This keeps smoothing tight around joins and you get the result in this render. Base was also splayed out a bit. I was going for angular branches but there is an extra way to make it bend. One step at a time though.

This actually goes against my branches as separate geometry but it seems there are several ways. This technique does keep the geometry low poly and Plant Factory will not create trees with this technique. it will lack the intelligent geometry decisions you can make at every step of the growth to change the effects.

I will not be using Plant Factory, that's for certain.

[TheBadger]

your plants really have a signature to em'. I really am looking forward to the scenes! And slowly but surly, I have begun to look into the software you have been telling us about.

[efflux]

I believe Wings could be useful no matter what other software you use. What you have to do is investigate it quite thorougly because on the surface it might seem quite simple but actually, it isn't. One key thing is right click on the context menus as you choose the tool. That opens up more powerful features but you have learn what they do. As you grasp it you can start assigning key commands. Those are assigned by hovering over the tool on the menu and keying Insert. Then you choose the key you want and you will see it appear on the menu. This is fast and easy to see the key commands. It's not possible for me to quickly say all the things it does. You could in fact write quite a large manual. The info line at the bottom takes you through what can be done.

For organic type stuff Wings works great but it has a mechanical slant. I don't know what you'd call it. It's hard surface modelling of a kind but with masses of tweaks. It's fun to use. You can constantly experiment and find odd things. I don't get this with other software. I find a lot of it quite boring to use.