CG Foliage

[agolk2]

Hey guys and gals,

 

I'm challenging myself to create some 3d foliage for my CG arch scenes. This is the first one - a tree. Let me know what you think so far.

 

Thanks,

Golk

[Exellite]

need to work on the texture, its noticably tiled. Its looking good though. I like the ground too, what did you use for that?

[agolk2]

I havent even started on the textures. Working more on modelling Got them from cgtextures.com and created my own displacement. Ill have an updated version soon.

[trino]

generally this kind of work will have a direct light, you should put a direct light and see how it goes, i say this because the intensity of the textures may change a lot when you put your lights, the textures look good and tiling thing already metioned, keep it up.

[agolk2]

Here's an update....let me know what you think. Maybe I'll release the models to all the CGarchitect.com people after I'm done.

[Nic H]

textures look fine but the form doesnt look very natural. Are you using reference pics? I find it really hard to make up the way a tree grows and branches off without tracing a real one.

 

Are you using edit poly? The way I did it was by drawing a heap of splines over a photo then extruding polys along those splines to get the main form, with the tapering and twist options in edit poly its quiet easy to quickly block out the tree, meshsmooth is very useful as well rather than getting bogged down smoothing by adding more polys.

 

Chamfering verts and extrding from the subsequent polys is a good way to get the smaller tertiary branches

 

Good luck anyway modelling trees aint easy! PFlow is the easiet way to do leaves once you get the hang of it.

[agolk2]

I'm using reference pics but not as a reference in MAX, just to look at. Once I get all the branches on I'm sure we will be in business. Here's an update.

 

Thanks for the comments so far.

[AFK_Matrix]

Nice branches mate they do look good. One thing I would say is that the trunk is too straight, it needs to have some bumps or make it less straight and more natural.

[Tommy L]

Looks great. How are you planning on doing the leaves? Modelling? Particle cloud? opacity maps?

[agolk2]

Baby steps, Tom. Baby steps haha. We will figure out the leaves when I get to that point.

 

Thanks for the comment.

[mahorela]

When I have done this kind of thing before, Opacity maps were the best solution for leaves. Using planes as a scatter compound object and then tweaking the rotation and scale of the instances was how I went about it. It's quite similar to the approach that the xfrog people take when creating their leaves. of course pines, palms etc are a different story. There will always be some planes which don't quite fit with the branches but you can always get rid of those.

[agolk2]

Hey bob,

been a long time since weve spoken. When I am done with this library I'll probably release it to the community so we can benefit from it and add to it

[mahorela]

nooooooo.......horde it

 

when people ask you where you got your beautiful tree and plant models you can say;

 

"THEY ARE NOT FOR SALE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

 

LOL

 

just joking.......your a generous guy

[Tommy L]

I'm using reference pics but not as a reference in MAX, just to look at. Once I get all the branches on I'm sure we will be in business. Here's an update.

 

Thanks for the comments so far.

 

Hello Andrew, hows the tree coming along? any chance i could pinch the model from you, not the leaves, just the branches and trunk? What would you like in exchange?