Cute Air Balloon Scene

[ssharma26 (Shweta Sharma)]

[shannonz]

I like the simplicity of this style. I especially like your trees. About the only thing I would suggest here, is that the tree foliage is too visibly faceted. Everything else is smooth and flowing, so the tree faceting sticks out to my eye. Overall, though, I really love this! Thanks for sharing!!

[ssharma26 (Shweta Sharma)]

Thank You for the valuable feedback
Yes I agree with the trees
I did think about it too. I was wondering if I should keep it low poly or high poly.
I’ll apply the Sub-Div modifier

Thanks again for appreciating my work!

[ssharma26 (Shweta Sharma)]

But also, do you think if I keep the trees a bit faceted, it’ll look like there are leaves? In the sense, tree leaves are usually a bit on the sharp side

Let me know your thoughts!

[shannonz]

@ssharma26

Let me know your thoughts!

*(cue dramatic music)*

I come from the land of Cartoonia, so I’ve spent cumulative months (years?) pondering & fretting over the possibilities and many ways of saying “tree”, while trying hard to avoid any semblance of photo-realism (as this would destroy the cartoony motif / illusion).

The results of my research seem to indicate:

• if you’re gonna lollipop-tree, don’t flinch. Lean into it. (Miles Davis once said something along the lines of (paraphrase) “There are no wrong notes in (bee-bop) Jazz improvisation, as long as you don’t flinch.” == “I MEANT to do that.”)
• if you’re gonna low-poly, ditto. (note that nothing else in your image is “low-poly”, so that buys you a style-clash).
• if you’re going to aim for photo-realism, then you have to achieve that in all aspects of your image (infeasible with cartooning).

Just to share ideas…

• Straight lollipop (pure spheres and cones, with cylinder trunks. sorry for lack of materials here.) :
  

  

• low-poly style (this one followed someone’s tutorial, I don’t recall whose. Foliage is icospheres followed by decimation modifier to reduce face-count & increase randomness of facets) :
  

  

• low-poly pines (back when face-instancing was a thing) :
  

  

• pseudo-lollipop:
  (randomly extrude some faces of sphere, then add subdiv-surface, w/ translucent material)
  

  

• pseudo-lolllipop:
  (invisible ball at end of each branch, onto which are particle-emitted a low-poly “jack” shape (extruded 6 faces of a small cube, and slightly scaled the distal faces)) … hints at leaf-clutter, but keeps the geometry-memory relatively low)
  [this image is relatively over-exposed, but other variants of same used too much depth-of-field blur to see the “leaf” shape.]
  

  

• minimal lollipop with “not-too-many” real leaves:
  (sphere for lollipop, particle-system leaves, with volume-scattering inside the main sphere to hint at “more”)
  

  

• an early geometry-nodes attempt… scattered ellipsoids over a few lolli-sphers per tree… [it was one of those weird moments when I saw the em-and-em (chocolate candies) resemblance and drew an “m” on the basic “leaf” ellipsoid. But this was for an animation, and geometry nodes at that time was still too unstable so the leaves were flickering, and I couldn’t get the “m” texture to behave… had to lose the “m” in the animation… too bad.]
  

  

• more recent geometry-nodes recursive scattering using the iteration-zone:
  (leaves are low-poly icospheres. Put one big icosphere at top of tree-trunk, then for each recursion, scatter points on faces, halve the size of the icospheres, instance icospheres on points… then recurse. The trees pictured here have around 5 recursions if I recall correctly.)
  

  

• … and I have to plug Mush-Mush & the Mushables … watch just the forest/nature background scenery of this cartoon. Whoever is responsible for this is a genius IMHO.

I apologize if I’ve hijacked your thread… but maybe we need a big long thread on ways to tree.

To recap, I like your trees. I like the transparency you used, and the simple trunks.

[ssharma26 (Shweta Sharma)]

Thank you for sharing all these details with me. Appreciate it! It’s really helpful. I love those translucent material which you have used.

[shannonz]

Another example of lollipop trees can be seen in Revolting Rhymes (clip) at the 12-second mark – totally round top, with silly leaf particle-system on top. The full movie by Magic Light Pictures (studio) seems not to be on youtube. All their work is worth studying.

Keep having fun with blender!

[ssharma26 (Shweta Sharma)]

Thanks for sharing the clip. I checked it out!
Yes, those lollipop trees are cute. I’ve subscribed to their channel.

Yup Blender is certainly fun! The best ever for learning about 3D art and stuff!

[bartv (Bart Veldhuizen)]

I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!

[ssharma26 (Shweta Sharma)]

Oh, thanks a lot Bart

[ssharma26 (Shweta Sharma)]

Where is the link Bart?
Sorry can’t find it

[shannonz]

link:

Best of Blender Artists: 2024-15

(about 3/4 of the way down the page)

[ssharma26 (Shweta Sharma)]

Thanks Shannon