3D trees

3D trees

I am haveing trouble createing 3D trees. My objective is to creat game quality trees, with low poly counts so that rendering in realtime can be fast. I figure just a basic trunk with some planes faceing a few different directions should suffice, and some use of transparenc, but does anyone here have some suggestions to create them quickly. Now heres a suggestion to Martin, some other 3D apps, have a fractal based tree generater, but those apps cost too much, and do not seem to be as easy to use. Most standalone 3D tree generators are for windows, and export in strange formats (namely DXF files that behave strangely) The orintation of the objects is almost always wrong too.

Below is a picture from Nanosaur2, that shows the basic effect I want to acheive. I will of coarse have other types of trees too, deciduous, palm, fern, etc.

Hi
This is done with an ancient treegenerator for Mac, exporting such strange dfx-files. Lots of manual work has to be done to handle it as one whole thing. I don´t think such files are very helpful in gamedevelopement where polycount counts. This palm got for example over 2000, I would think 1800 too much. An approach with simple planes or polyshapes and alphatextures like in good old "Tomb Raider" will do it much better, if you don´t want to end up as an under-gardener.

With kindest regards
Frank

PS: If you want to play with it even though I can mail it;-)

3d plants

there is a website that has a good selection of free 3d plants which fire into cheetah very well:

http://3dplants.0catch.com/index.html

other than that, a program like Vue5 infinity will export very realistic vegitation which once you have tweeked the exported bitmaps by merging the alpha channels will give you quite decent results..

Regards


Luke

Hi,

Arbaro (http://arbaro.sourceforge.net/) is a really cool and free software, written in Java, and it is able to generate a huge range of realistic trees. You can generate your own model, with simple and comprehensive form factor parameters.

It exports povray, DXF, and OBJ file formats, and exported trees work fine with Cheetah.

But this solution is no more a good one for game purpose, as there is too many vertices and faces (at least one face per leaf), and no clustering algorithm.

Cyril.

I also have been playing around with some tree models.A stand alone plant generator that runs on mac is http://www.onyxtree.com/ whether it helps your needs im not sure.

I use Onyx and it does a great job creating 2D and 3d trees. I do not know one thing about games, but I would assume any 3D trees will be too large for any game development.

What do you normally use, 2d with an alpha? I really don't know the process.

Hi,

for most real-time game engines you are pretty much limited to simple polygon plane and good texture mapping I'm afraid.

There are a few basic techniques. There is the straightforward billboard - just stick you texture to a flat plane. This is ok if you mainly plan to pan left and right and a bit of not too close dolly. Also you can use a tree-spike technique where you wrap your texture around cones or tubes so that you can travel around in you scenery.

For layer spraying tons of scenery onto texture maps you cannot do better than painter nozzels. Painter is expensive but Purplus software sell the OEM (disk only) version for just over $100 at the moment.

gardenhose.com have some great nozzel libs and some good tutorials - they did used to have a tree-spike one (but that was some time ago).

Also take a good look at the rustboy site. Brian Taylor shows how he has built up some of the scenes - it will give you an idea how to construct scenery units in movable blocks with tex maps on simple shapes. Some of Brian's work is astonishing. Also bare in mind that rustboy started out to show how to make complex animations with simple tools like Infini-D (now Carrara sort of).

Also if you are a Star Wars fan there is a really good tutorial on how to split up a flat photo background so that you can pan around it - it is on one of the extended versions of the latest three films (I think the middle one). It also shows how to make great water textures by filming salt falling against a black backboard and then using it as a bump/distortion map on a curved surface.

Hope this helps,
Regards Rob.

I have no problem with a few simple planes, but any help with good ways to make them would be useful. I was figureing heavy use of texture mapping would be needed. If you look at th graphics from Nanosaur2, I can sort of see how trees are made, but was wondering if those guys modeled each tree seperately, and if there is some trick that could be used, pehaps with the array tool or something.

frank beckmann said:

Hi
This is done with an ancient treegenerator for Mac...

Click to expand...

what ancient tree generator is that one Frank... and is it so ancient that it does not run on OSX...?

pity Onyx is not a little cheaper... for the casual user it is a bit pricey unfortunately...

cheers
Trevor

Hi TrevorM-L,
the classic-app is "Tree-Pro", from (and that´s a small world) ONYX-Computing.
It celebrates its 10th birthday now. It´s a tiny little app, but produces tons of seperate steams, leaves and trunks for one tree.

Frank

Ok, this is whre I am at, and I am happy with the overall appearance, but I've got strange things happening wih the transparency if I try to use fog. Anyway, here is a sample of what I've got so far. More types or trees are on my list, and I will try to document how to create them in Cheetah3D. This is a learning experience for me as much as it is for you. Sorry about the low quality of the lower picture, I included it to show at the upper part of the tree, there is a triangular shaped plane that simply has a texture attached. It is used in conjuction with the branch layers, which are bottomless cones. Each cone has only 5 sides. The texures are 128x128. These trees are idenitcal modelwise, all I've changed here is rotaion and scale.

Nice trees!

I've had problems with fog and transparency as well. It looks like maybe the fog behind the transparency isn't being drawn. Unfortunately I haven't found a solution yet... I'll have to watch your thread and see if anyone else has one

Brad

I've worked with a number of 3D apps where any kind of fog or visible light is not compatible with transparency.

For example, Carrara always showed a vague outline of the whole of a partially transparent object once you added fog.

Also the EI Animator manual states that for technical reasons fog/visible light rays are not compatible with transparency and will not render as expected - it goes on to say that light rays and fog will only interact properly with actual geometry, so if you want a hole in an object you have to build it rather than add a transparency map.

Martin should be able to tell you if the same applies to Cheetah.

Regards Rob.

trees...

the best 3d trees are on vue...tell me otherwise

regards

luke

sorry to bring up a dead thread, but wow Luke. Those are awesome. Where did you get the water texture that you used there?