{"id":2378,"date":"2012-12-05T07:39:27","date_gmt":"2012-12-05T07:39:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.terrymatthes.com\/?p=2378"},"modified":"2024-03-06T20:10:27","modified_gmt":"2024-03-06T20:10:27","slug":"game-trees-wip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/2012\/12\/05\/game-trees-wip\/","title":{"rendered":"Game Trees WIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Evegreen<\/a>I’ve been watching people model trees all at work over the past few days and it’s driving me crazy. I must make a tree! So in keeping with my current project I’m going to sculpt an evergreen tree in the with snow on it for import into the Unreal Development Kit. The first thing I wanted to get done was the base mesh. I with the Speed Tree<\/strong> program that comes with the UDK. You can’t export from here but it does create the geometry in a pretty efficient way. After tooling around with settings for about an hour I was able to get a look I liked. Next I needed to recreate the same style of geometry in Maya. To get things started I began with the trunk. The trunk is pretty straight forward. It’s just a cylinder extruded<\/strong> along an ever-so crooked EP Curve<\/strong>. The next thing to do was create the branches. To save time you can model one branch and use Duplicate Special<\/strong>(Edit > Duplicate Special) to space a bunch of them along the +Y<\/span><\/strong> axis. This will not work properly unless your branch is pointing outwards from the center of your trunk with its pivot point also at that center of the trunk.<\/p>\n

Use the Distance Tool<\/strong> (Create > Measurement Tool > Distance Tool) to get the\u00a0 height of your tree. Divide your height by how many branches you want. Add that value to the Translate Y<\/span><\/strong> Offset. And don’t forget to also offset the Y<\/strong><\/span> rotation so the branches don’t space out in a straight row. Record (write down) your offset values as you’ll be using the same values to duplicate and space your “Fronds<\/strong>” or leaf cards. Your cards can be as simple or as complex as you want. Since I am just using this mesh as a guide in Zbrush I will keep my cards simple. I used a Bend<\/strong> Deformer<\/strong> ([Animation]Create Deformer > Non Linear > Bend) to curve a plane with 5 divisions in the height and only one in depth. I then tapered the sheet by selecting all the vertices at the end and scaling them together. You could stop modeling here and start texturing, but I want the poly count a lot lower. A Single tree as it stands is around 5000 vertices and unless you’re in a cinematic situation where you can control the poly count that’s just way to high for a tree. I think by taking this into Zbrush we can achieve a similar look at no more than 25% of the vertices. As added punishment I’m also going to push myself to use poly paint on this sculpt X_X<\/p>\n

Terry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been watching people model trees all at work over the past few days and it’s driving me crazy. I must make a tree! So in keeping with my current project I’m going to sculpt an evergreen tree in the with snow on it for import into the Unreal Development Kit. The first thing I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2380,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[341,343,5,9,10],"tags":[28,83,91,109,115,183,257,264,288,295,300],"class_list":["post-2378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-game","category-modelingsculpting","category-techart","category-unreal-2","tag-bend","tag-duplicate","tag-evergreen","tag-foliage","tag-frond","tag-maya","tag-speed-tree","tag-spruce","tag-tree","tag-udk","tag-unreal"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/trees1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2378"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4352,"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378\/revisions\/4352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrymatthes.com\/2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}