I am going to try this out. If it works the way that it is described here this would be great for making low poly hair for game characters. I have always has problems making hair for low poly characters. I KNOW blender has a great number of tools for hair. The hair particle tools are great. But they are mainly useful for static renders. If you use them on animations or game characters the hair ends up being more polygons then the actual character mesh.
One question is there a way of making the polygons flat faces instead of cubes? From the screen shots posted here they all look like they extrude as cubes. what I want to use this for it for making low poly hair styles on otherwise bald characters.
I tried the addon with the official blender build if 2.63. I get this error
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “C:\Users\DD\Desktop\Blender Files\blender263-64\2.63\scripts\addons\Bran
ch_Extrusion.py”, line 108, in modal
face = bpy.context.object.data.faces.active
AttributeError: ‘Mesh’ object has no attribute ‘faces’
Any progress on a written tutorial on how to get this to work?
Never mind I deduced it on my own. The key was turning down the minimum distance value and turning down the taper value. If I get sometime today I will do a small write up on it.
Branch extrusion start with the idea to emulate the relative function of 3DS max…
so i’ll start to explain how to make a simple tree branches to use in a game engine for low poly trees.
after you have installed the add on you have couple of function that help you with some task.
the most important are: Taper value and min distance.
Min distance is the distance between two faces( the starter one and the extruded one)
The taper value is the size of the extruded face relative of the previous one.
SO LET’S Start
In order to get access to branch extrusion select the default cube and go in edit mode
Now go in the tool shelf and you’ll see the branch extrusion tab:
-Now hit 7 on the num pad to go in the top view
-Select the north face
-in the constraint option select z axis
-Now click on the branch extrusion button
-move the cursor near to the selected face
-Now Hold LMB and move the cursor in the desired location( the location must be in a ray equal to the Min Distance, in this case 5 meters) as you can see the face is extruded on the position of the cursor
keep holding the LMB and make some few extrusion, try to give a natural tree branch look. It’s not import hold the LMB between the face but it’s important that you hold it in the point where the next extrusion appear.
To end the extrusion use RMB ( with the option collapse active, the branch end with one vertex)
to make other extrusion simply add a loop (CTRL+ R), move it to nearest face.
select one of lateral face and make some new extrusion, play with the taper value e min distance in order to get a natural aspect of the overall branch.
-at the end you should have a somthing similar to this
