(http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/trees1 NULL.jpg)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 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 along an ever-so crooked EP Curve. The next thing to do was create the branches. To save time you can model one branch and use Duplicate Special(Edit > Duplicate Special) to space a bunch of them along the +Y 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.
Use the Distance Tool (Create > Measurement Tool > Distance Tool) to get the height of your tree. Divide your height by how many branches you want. Add that value to the Translate Y Offset. And don’t forget to also offset the Y 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” 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 Deformer ([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
Terry