Trees for Beginners in 3ds Max Tutorial

[braveryd]

*Oops I posted this in the wrong spot before.*

I remember back when I was first starting out in 3D Modeling and I had no idea on how to approach trees. I thought that I should give back to the online 3d community by trying to give everyone my quick and easy method to making trees.



This is by no means the only way to create trees and there are a million better methods I'm sure. For the interns at the office we try to teach them this method to help them start out on how to think when doing more complex trees.

Well here goes and please feel free to comment or offer suggestions everyone. You guys have always been helpful to me in the past and I'm sure I could use a bit more help here and there.


The first step in 3DS Max is to go to the AEC Extended objects. This will have the foliage option inside. The foliage option will have a bunch of code to procedurally create trees. On their own it's rather weak but we'll be messing with it a little bit to make it look nicer.



We'll start out with a generic oak since it's a fairly common looking tree.



From there we'll adjust the Density which will change the amount of leaves. I usually keep it between 0.05-0.1 just for the sake of keeping the triangle count down. Then the pruning adjusts how low on the trunk the trees start popping up.

For this tutorial we'll have these numbers:
Height: 25'
Density: 0.09
Pruning: 0.3


So now that we have this pleasant looking tree we'll begin to separate the trunk from the leaves to make it easier to texture and adjust the leaf size. What you're going to want to do is hold copy the object via clone.



After that you'll uncheck the leaves box on one of the trees and uncheck trunk as well as branches on the other. It should look similar to this.



You can now line up their coordinates again so that we can see how the leaves look on the branches for the next step.



The next step will involve us converting the leaves into Editable Mesh and then converting to Editable Poly. I like to work in Editable Poly since that was how I was taught to keep it.



Now we'll go into element mode in the editable poly and select all of the leaves and scale them up until we think they're big enough. This might take a bit of experimentation to get the right size.



After that we can apply your leaf texture of choice. And voila! We have a fairly tasty looking tree. The trunk needs to be textured as well but there's no easy way to do that. You're just going to have to unwrap and texture that part.



Oh. And another trick to keep polys down is to delete some of the branchs via the elements once you convert the trunk to editable poly.




Oops. I almost forgot to include the leaves I used in the tutorial. Hopefully this will be useful for somebody who is out there and overwhelmed by trees like I was.

[Sir Apple]

Actually, this is what I was looking for really.

I'm not a beginner but I've had trouble in the past... tried dozens of methods but imma give this one a go later on.

[pAldred]

Awesome! Thanks for the post!

[sdinesh86]

Thanx a lot braveryd for this.

This is what i was looking for from such a long time, i had posted this query here itself and now i got quite satisfactory answer for it thax again

[Trasheater]

This is something that I have been looking for. Thank you so much for this.

Would you be able to do a more detailed tree so we can see your method for doing really detailed trees?

Again thanks man.

[german01]

Really useful, great idea. Thanks

[TheCorey]

Thanks for this. I made a quick tree to test it out:



It's not very optimized (1300+ tris). But the results are pretty good.

[pAldred]

Here is one I did up. Looks a bit spikey in some spots where the planes are at an angle. The tree is about 600 tris.

Rendered in real time with the DX Display in 3Ds Max 9.

[braveryd]

Trasheater - When I'm doing higher poly trees it's not very different from what is shown up there. What I'd do is adjust the pruning and the density of leaves. Then from there you would adjust your leaf texture to match the scale. The texture I have up there is meant for a full branch almost.

pAldred - What I'd do for your tree to help treat the pointedness problem is to increase the plain size a bit to lessen the amount of empty space between the branches which makes the pointedness more apparent. Another possible solution is to increase the emissive level of the leaves. Naturally light hits the leaves and they seem to light up a bit. Or if all else fails, sometimes generating a new seed will possibly spawn a better leaf formation.


My technique is not the best and I hear most people use SpeedTree to generate trees for a very high price $$$. Perhaps if we keep messing with this, we'll find another step to take this to the next level.

Hopefully this was helpful for you guys.

[Snipergen]

My question is where do you find or make the textures :P