Week 5

This week I am starting to model some trees, I have spent many hours browsing the internet looking up tutorials on how to make tree trunks, branches and even leaves.

Many of the ones I have read through teach you the simplest way is to start from scratch and extrude and bevel your way from trunk to tip. One problem I found using this method was that if you didn’t have a picture of something in your head to reference it to, it just seemed to start to get messy as you can see below.



Another tutorial showed how you can draw your trunk and branches in line mode and then convert it all into 3d. This was a very straightforward tutorial to work through and the results were surprisingly rewarding. However I started to expand on my new found knowledge and wanted to create more branches and even some twigs for the branches and creating them this way started to get very complex indeed so some limitations apply.

So I went back to the drawing board and just by using cylinders started drawing my tree from scratch. This was a very simple way of producing a tree and its branches; every cylinder can be moved without messing up any other part of the tree. They can be scaled, rotated moved etc very easily. When I was finally happy with the set up of my tree I started to connect the pieces together. This was a little bit time consuming but I think it was well worth it, as you can see with the following screenshots.

This final image of the trunk and its branches has a mesh smooth modifier just to round off the edges a little bit and has given my tree a cool effect. All it needs now is a realistic bark texture and I can proceed to the next step; its leaves.

Leaves

Now this is proving to be the hardest part of these models and the most time consuming too, I tried making a leaf by drawing a picture of one using the line tool and then extruding it but drawing in max without a pen is pretty difficult, so I dismissed that idea.

So I have discussed this problem with a few other students and found out that all I need to do is make a box as thin as possible and map a leaf texture on to it. So it will give the illusion that the tree has leaves. So quite simply I made it so:

Then it came to the really tedious task of scaling, rotating, moving and cloning the leaf all around my tree and then repeating this task over and over and over again…

Now all I have to do is find some more leaf textures, and make some other trees!