Plants and Trees

[IrascibleOne]

Similar to my pirate thread, this thread will be all about plants and trees. Over the next couple of weeks I plan on making a bunch of different trees and plants. Maybe some other nature related items as well. Will be good practice and I'll walk away with some content for the site and assets to use in the future. I do intend on finishing up a tutorial about the Sapling addon as well.

Anyways, here's my first tree. I used a fairly young tree in my backyard as reference. Needs some work, but I think it's a decent first step.

[brektzar]

Looking good!
Did you model this and then used particles?

[IrascibleOne]

Yep. I spent a bunch of time figuring out the Sapling Addon to get the branches and used particle hair to do the needles. Then I poorly composited the gradient background in there so the tree was a little easier to see.

[brektzar]

I see

i am hoping this will turn into a plants repository.
I MIGHT be able to add some high poly trees i made with some program, i just need to see if the textures are CC or something else... cant remember -_-

[IrascibleOne]

Sound great!

Speaking of textures, I went into my backyard and got some leaves. Some need to be redone, but I am thinking about getting back out there tomorrow to get some more and maybe get my hands on some leaves when they start changing colors in the next couple of weeks.

leaves.jpg

I do want to make bump maps (and maybe normal maps) and of course the transparency textures too.

[brektzar]

Apparently my trees are lost... Cant find them =( But using Tree[d], arbaro or the Sapling addon trees are made fairly quickly anyway ^^

Will you share the leaf textures?

When doing the bump maps, maybe you should desaturate the images and add a multiply layer with the same image and make a normal map out of it instead?
The multiply layer would help remove(darken them so they dont add any significant height values) some of the uneven areas in the leaf that is smooth in real life but would get bumped in blender.
Just a tip though, you mioght have a better way of doing things

[IrascibleOne]

I do plan on sharing at least some of them, but I am considering selling some as well. Kind of depends on the quality of my images and the maps I end up with. It is my first time making textures, so I am learning some of this as I go.

Thanks for the tips! I actually don't have a better way. I haven't looked into how to do bump/normal maps properly, so it's all somewhat new to me. I know what they do and how they are supposed to look, but that's about it.

[brektzar]

Yeah, you should definitely sell them, at least the ones of high quality.
Remember to not use the ones youre selling with any model you end up sharing

[IrascibleOne]

Can't get something I like on this one. Can't the addon to cooperate the way I think it should. This is a Western Red Cedar. Just a basic image texture on the leaves. The trunk is just a diffuse color.

untitled.png

Some relevant babbling:
Something I don't like about the sapling addon is that all leaves are the same size so everything gets clumped up at the top where the branches are smaller and closer together. You also cannot change the leaf distribution based on the height of the tree (or fewer leaves on smaller branches). I could manually change the leaf size afterwards with proportional editing and then delete some. I could also use particle objects. With particles, I could use a weight map to control leaf distribution/size and include some random sizing. Would take a lot more work though.

Branches have a similar problem. Their size is fine, but because everything is evenly distributed, the tiny branches have the same number of subbranches/splits as the big ones. That makes the top more clumpy, which in turn makes the leaves more clumpy at the top. You can see this in the previous tree I made and that's even after I've manually deleted many of the branches at the peak.

Then again, maybe I am missing some obvious setting I should be using? Will have to keep playing around with it.

[IrascibleOne]

Just a quick update, I think I am going to use InsaneBump to create the height, normal, and specular maps of my leaves. Will be testing that out and showing the results in the next couple of days. It's free. There's a thread at BlenderArtists by the creator if you want more info on it.