Week Ten; The Tree Project

So, quickly after we finished our stylized house project and submitted we had the last two weeks of term to complete two trees to fit into our medieval style village. The idea for this project is to have a better idea for creating organic forms in 3ds max, and as games are heavily populated with them, we start with trees. I admit I did struggle with this project in the first week and had to re-do my tree several times as I was not happy with it whatsoever.

Initially I wanted to model a Japanese style maple tree and a willow tree, but during the first week I encountered problems that I couldn't move past, which meant for the hand-in, I had to change what types of tree I was to model.

Flatshader of my Oak tree model

Flatshader of my Oak tree model

I started the week by trying to model a willow tree, but when it came around to texturing and placing the leaves, I didn't have a large enough tri budget to bulk out the canopy of the tree effectively. Therefore I moved onto modeling something more simplistic with big clumps of leave forms that I could model as one oval with alphas sticking out, whilst keeping with to the style guide – an Oak tree. The process started with a mood board; picking out forms of the branches, trunk and leaves. After this was completed I went straight into modelling, and in hindsight it was probably wiser to draw up some concepts and figure out how I was going to model these trees whilst conforming to the tri budget.

Areas of the oak tree look sparsely populated with leaves - should have populated the underside of the canopies
as that is where the player would have been looking at most.

I used the spline tool to model the trunk and pulled around verts to make the tree look somewhat stylized. I also used the spline tool to create a branch, and duplicated this branch, scaled it and rotated it to create the others. We were allowed three texture sheets, two for tiling textures and an alpha texture sheet. Although I utilised all three, using the tiling textures for the bark and the blocky mass of the leaves under the alphas, I feel I should have tried to spend more time stylizing the textures.

Undercoat leaves texture and birds nest detail.

Tiling bark texture

Oak leaf alpha

If I could have done this week again I would have just continued modelling the Willow tree and just have made it aesthetically nicer and spent more time on creating the alphas and texturing and modelling rather than having to rush the Oak tree because I ditched the Willow tree.

I'm definitely going to have to revisit this project and spend more time on modelling trees in my spare time as I am thoroughly unhappy with the outcome and it's vital to improve on modelling organic forms.

Final Render

Final Render