Before I head off and try to replicate Stephens solution for the twigs I thought I could share my solution to the challenge we got at the end of the last lecture, because I ended up using a little bit of a different route.
So here is my Twig Generator node tree:
You can download it and you should be able to zoom in to read the values if you want. The main difference is that I used our branching and branch distortion node groups from before to make a twig setup. Also leifs can spawn at the twig base. I did not bother to fix that, because I thought this minor detail would not show later when we make hundreds if not thousands of twigs on our tree, but its definitely an improvement to add leifs at realistic locations.
I then went ahead and made 10 different twigs using the node group shown above:
Using this new twig collection I tried distributing twigs on the tertiary and secondary branches. With a bit of tweaking of some primary and secondary branch seeds, this is what I got:
Honestly I think this looks pretty good. I havent tried it out yet but this might be a good setup to create a tree quickly, then maybe later hop into sculpting and make some finer adjustments to it. Might be worth a try. I remember I found the base tree setup quite bothersome which we did in the Blender Environment Artist: Create 3D Game Worlds course. For comparision, here is my low poly tree from the environments course:
Yes, there is a texture missing, but I am not bothering searching for it now! Still, the fact that the GDTV courses neatly integrate with each other and many ideas start to pop up in my mind on how to do things more efficiently speaks volumes so I am really glad I took the courses! Cant wait to learn more 