Trees are actually really difficult

Trees seem like they are far more effort than there worth, when you spend hours looking at references and trying to make it look good and it still comes out looking like crap, I can definitely see why nature assets packs are popular, I see them a lot on youtube tutorials when ever its something involving trees or shrubs they seem to pull out some asset pack they payed for, I’m assuming it because trees are quite finicky and difficult to get right.

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I agree. I think aren’t worth the effort but I think Is nice to know how to do them and are good examples to start learning blender. We need to keep practicing :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Mine VS Modular Trees addon (made in 5 min):


We are one step away from working for WoW Classic! haha

World of Warcraft trees (Vanilla):

Feeling nostalgic :cry:

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Your trees look pretty good to be honest, but the addon ones are just on another level aren’t they.

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Trees and plants generally are complex. Grant’s way is good enough for games if care and attention is given to their ‘design’. There is an inbuild tool that will generate trees, Sapling, that can be enabled in the preferences. However, better trees need more polygons and therefore diverge from the game use obsession. The new course style is game use, low poly.

Just like making humans or animals requires anatomy reference and study, so too does plant life. Trees are vastly more complex in structure than a person! Fortunately they are rarely the centre of the eye attention, so lower grade trees are often got away with.

As for the ‘packs’ it is down to personal preferences, I would always make my own. For my personal way, the point is making things myself so a few hundred hours research and attention to detail is what life is all about.

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Thanks for your reply, I do have that Sapling add on, I probably need to watch some videos on it because when I had a look at it before it caused blender to crash.

I do generally agree with making your own, when I started using blender I always envisioned making everything myself, it does get frustrating at times when things are not looking the way I would like, and for some reason I was under the assumption that trees would be easy, but as you said trees are generally complex, which I quickly realised when I started really looking at the tree references I found, its really finicky as well making sure all your branches are intersecting the main trunk.

I did see a couple of videos where a particle system was used for the leaves, and I did think those trees looked decent, so that might me something worth looking into, as the leaf placement is definitely the hardest part in my opinion, I would have to do more research but I assume that method would involve weight painting.

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Nice looking trees.I like the white one. Looks cool :grinning:. Great job. Adding a little more branches by duplication and scaling them up a little will make your trees look more amazing.
I agree. Trees are complex and hard to make. But with practice and a little effort once we understand the anatomy and the structure of the trees the workflow will become much more fun and easy. And to make trees look more realistic and natural we need them to have more vertices. With practice and experimenting with different techniques we can learn to make trees and plants look the way we want. Have fun dude!

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Thanks, I did make a few more adjustments after posting this, one of them was scaling them all up. thanks for your comment

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I Must agree that trees in fact are difficult and the more details you add/need, the less trees you can usually put into your game.

You are right that many tutorials are talking about (payed) add-ons, download asset packs (speedtree for example) which might relieve you from tedious tasks in objects that will hardly be noticed , but …

Being around for quite some time in games (consuming, not creating), many people notice when a game is using the same asset pack(s) also used in other games. Some might even say the developers lack creativity and such (which might not be the case when they knew how hard certain things are to be created like organic objects which still needs to look cool and believeable).

The method grant shows might be a lengthy one, but allows you to create them in the art style you want, as well as making futuristic trees or outerworldy ones with glowing leaves and whatever. These adaptions are so much harder in ‘paid assets’ as you have to redo so much other stuff to alter them, that it is almost the same as starting from scratch.

Your trees do not look bad or wrong, they give me the feeling of the style where people have bulgy bodies and small hands, feet and head… not sure how that style is called, but the reverse of Funco Popheads…

Nailing the result the first time is hard to achieve, especially sculpting is a process you need to practice on a frequent base for a couple of hours and hone these skills (not sure who said that, but i found it a good advice)

Keep it up, practice a lot and you will see results improving each time.

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Been at these 2 trees for a few hours (with breaks in between) and still not satisfied, but the current result for me feels better then i actually expected.

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Good job :smiley:

i find trees really hard to make :slight_smile: and i totally agree with you.
they are so much effort… but i think they are more lightweight than the generated ones so for games it could be worth it. might be wrong here but i believe they are lighter.

maybe try making the branches a bit bigger from your trees. :slight_smile:
someone once told me that depending on the tree type you should keep a percentage in mind.
a percentage of how much green and how much brown you see.
i usually try to go between 40 and 80% green :smiley:

hope u having a good day :3

Hey those look really great!
Good job!

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I actually made lots of changes before my final render with my trees, I finished it a few weeks ago my tress came out looking okay in the end.

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A marvelous result !

Also like the bushes with the blue flowers (or berries?) and looks magnificent with the starry background and all!

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Got them from Quixel Bridge, can’t remember the exact ones but its 2 different assets merged together, Quixel Bridge is a great resource especially for PBR textures, I’m pretty sure you can only use them for personal projects outside of Unreal Engine though.

Not sure if that still is the case, but i registered as UE developer so i potentionally have access to atleast all the megascan’s from quixel, not sure if that includes Bridge as well.

Have not yet made use of it, and not sure if they can be used outside of UE for anything else then personal (non-commercial) projects. I code in Unity as i find C-Sharp easier to code for and i believe UE is C++ only, but UE has a nice feature to auto-generate LOD for imported objects which works very well, hence i use it at times for conversion work.

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