Hello, everyone. I haven’t been on this site in quite a while…
I made this low-poly tree a while back, and now I’ve decided to share it. It has 432 poly’s, and 780 tri’s. The bark texture was hand-painted from scratch in Gimp(with nothing more than a mouse- real men have no need for fancy tablets;)), and the leaves texture was made by rendering out a model of some branches and leaves with Blender. I also baked normal maps for both of the textures, and added some vertex color paint to add some depth to the lighting. I hope you guys find this helpful.
Note that the vertex paint is optimized for Blender’s “color management” shading mode. You can turn off color management if you like, but then the darkness of the vertex color will be thrown off.
I learned everything I know about modeling trees from a certain YoFrankie tutorial- look it up if you like.
Yeah, those edges bother me too. I made those creases in the leaf clumps to add some smooth shading to the tree, so it wouldn’t be just a bunch of flat polygons(on second thought, though, maybe that would be the lesser of two evils). If Blender supported custom normals, though, I could create better shading and would have no need for those edges. Maybe I could try making a Python script to change the normals, though I heard Blender likes to revert them back to the default.
@Helooo: good idea, that would improve the shading, while cutting down on polygons. However, I’m calling this tree finished for now. But I’ll take your advice into account when I make some more foliage.
However, I can’t stress enough how much the ability to set custom normals would add to the look of low-poly foliage. Take a look at this link for some comparison pictures between default and custom normals on trees: http://wiki.polycount.com/VertexNormal#Foliage_Shading
What’s the most popular site for sharing Blender models? I’d like to upload this tree to it.
If the tree is animated would be nice too.
That would be nice. To be honest, though, I don’t feel like putting any more work into this tree at the moment. Maybe in the future I’ll animate it, in which case I’ll be sure to share.
After using Smoking_mirror’s normal script on my tree(giving much smoother shading in the GE), I realized that there wasn’t a point any longer in using “bent” leaf clumps, so I switched to a more standard shape made of two intersecting quads. I also fixed several “bald spots” where the branches were showing through, and made a low-detail version, on the second layer.
For the low-detail version, I reduced the trunk’s poly count, but couldn’t reduce the leaves’ poly count without significantly thinning out the tree. However, I did reduce their vertex count with the remove doubles feature, which should improve performance, assuming BGE uses triangle strips or indices instead of drawing each triangle individually.
