Competition #10 - pruvaloo

[pruvaloo]

Hey guys, I've kinda been on hiatus lately, but I saw this comp the other day and thought I would give it a go. As soon as I read the specs I knew the kind of model that I wanted to make, which is a take on the 'tree of life' idea. And this is also a great excuse to make a tree that actually looks like a tree - my trees have never worked before lol!

It's a mystical tree that grows health restoring fruit. The player would go to the tree and pick up fruit off the floor (the ones which were so ripe that they fell to the ground) and each piece of fruit would increase the players health by say 10 points.

When all the fruit has been picked up the player must wait a set number of minutes while the tree grows some more, which would help to stop players camping on pick up spawn points - which is something that really bugs me in games where the pick ups regenerate only a few seconds after being picked up.

I've never really connected that well with corridor based FPS, so I designed this to fit in more with a natural outdoor setting, something along the lines of the Antalus map from UT.

Anyway, here's the basic trunk and branch structure

[pruvaloo]

Leaf planes and first pass of the texture. 908 triangles at the moment.

[Jarnauga]

Can I see some flats? Especially of the leaves, please? I have to do a similar thing for a game project and yours is just looking really sexy. I'd like to know what a single plane looks like on texture.

[pruvaloo]

Cheers!

Ok here is the bark texture, I've scaled it down from 512x512



Then for the leaves I have used 3 textures to kinda add variety and break the foliage up a bit. Again scaled them down from 1024x512



I made 3 planes and gave each of them one of the leaf textures, then just copied these loads of times and arranged them on the branches



I could of probably got away with just using flat 2 triangle planes, but I figured it would be a bit better to try and get a little shape in them so I split them up. They still dont really use too many triangles though.

[Jarnauga]

Yeah, the crease in the planes gives it a much better effect.

Thanks again!

[sethodie]

I am not sure if trunk has right proportions. In my opinion it is to thick at the bottom and do not look natural.
Check this site. Maybe it can be usefull for you: Pawel Olas - LightWave Plug-in: TreesDesigner 1.5 and this examples Pawel Olas - LightWave Plug-in: TreesDesigner

[pruvaloo]

Jarnauga - no probs, hope you can make some hot trees with this method

sethodie - thanks, those links were really useful, will bookmark them as part of my reference library!

I've scaled the base of the trunk down a bit, might go back and add some more twists and turns into it to give it a bit more shape, but we will see.

Also been working on a new texture and normal map



and here is some of the lovely health restoring fruit. I wanted it to look unusual, so I spent a while looking up some exotic fruits, something that would hopefully stand out, but also be quite low poly as there would be a few of them on the tree, and came up with this.

[pruvaloo]