Hello,
I’m trying to model a pine tree with not much luck. Does anyone know of a good way to go about this or a link to a good tutorial? Thanks.
I use to look at tree pics and then make it in 3D. Try google for pics.
Well either you can use the pugin, goto the blenderwiki and find the simple tree tutorial, OR do what I do. It is kinda hard to make branches.
I’ll just tell you how to make the trunk.
So just make a circle and take each vertice and move it out. Extrude and scale a little bit. Repeat. It’s that easy.
make circle with only 6 to 10 verts Fract, Fract you will have between 30 and 50 verts 4/5s of them in random possitions. Extrude scale by a small percentage and rotate by 5 to 15 degrees in clockwise. then Extrude Scale and rotate the other way.
Branches are almost the same in a pine tree just each row up is smaller then one below, only smooth before your first extrude. The branches have less hight variation then the trunk. do not make the branches parallel to the ground they angle up slightly.
needles can be added with the partical system I am sure. I have not done this but am sure if hair and grass can be created with it needles can.
Yeah, this is a better explination.
Starting with a circle for the trunk would make things harder later for the branches, simply make a box model of it as in the trunk and branches are 4 sided and subsurf. Use proportional scaling with connected mode on for scaling the branches so they are smaller at the end.
Yeah, dmancrosse use particles in his great juggernaut project,
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=60249
it also includes the .blend file on the trees (page 3).
Maybe he use particles just for the needles, I dont know, cause I can’t figure out the .blend file, but maybe someone here can and could enlighten us?
Don’t you mean leafs?
Thank you all for your help. I’m going to try some of these methods and see what I come up with. I’ll let you all know. Again thanks for the help.
i suggest using a free program called arbaro, i know others here use it sometimes as well. it has a couple of presets for coniferous trees, and you just export them to obj format i think. anyway, it has good coniferous trees. you might want to remove doubles on them, i can’t remember. also, if you’re doing lots of trees, make a few and renders them in png format with render buttons set to RGBA and premul or key, then apply the renders to a plane as a texture, setting it to ‘use alpha’ and in materials buttons, ‘alpha’ and ‘ztransp’, and turn the alpha slider all the way down.
Don’t you mean leafs?[/quote]
Sorry for not coming back and finding this artical sooner. No I did not mean leaves. Do not know how much you know about english or trees but the Pinus verity have what are refered to as needles. Most evergreens do not have a compleat leaf, this is especially true of pines. My favorite real pine is the pinus radiata more commonly known as the monta rey pine. Unfotuantly I let someone else do my gardening once last year and they ringed my favorite example of it:…( It is just so much more in the mulch pile now.
Diferent plants have differnent arangements that fill the function of leaves. Grasses have blades, and rose bushes (other thinges as well) have groups of leafets. They serve the same function but have a differnt arangement and shape.
Ok you meant those I know pretty much about english and in my country (sweden) the most of the trees are pine trees so I knowpretty much about what you mean now.
I live in the Central San Jauquin valley in California… I have to travel an hour into the Sieras or 2 and a half hours to the coastal range to see pines that are not grown in someones yard. If I take the shorter trip I see more Sequoias than pines. They have a really strange arrangement for photsyntisis. I am not sure what the leaf like struture on them is called but I would not classify them as needles as they grow one out of the last(sort of). It is hard to describe to someone who has not seen them and needs little description if you have. Some Juliet series fractals look kinda like them. The only thing for sure is that both the tallest tree in the world and the largest around are Giant Sequoias. Not the same tree but differnt spesimens of the species.
Have pines in the yard? You live in a strange country.
Woohoo! My 1000 post. 
Wasn’t there something out a while back called “L-System”? Maybe google that, or search Elysiun for the topic.
Maybe we doesn’t want to cheat.
I know this thread is old but I need to know of a good way to make tropical trees and such. Or if there is a script instead.
There are some usefull links in this thread:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=68033&highlight=realistic+trees
The lsystem plugin trees I’ve tried to make look like they’ve barely survived some terrible nuclear accident <grin>. I’ve had better luck playing with the Arboro Java app. It comes with a bunch of stock trees you can modify then export to OBJ. The first tree I made ended up being a 37MB OBJ file that crashed Blender when I tried to import it. Below is a modified ‘desert bush’ I’ve made into an apple tree. If I can figure out how to attach a blend file, I’ll include that too.
Arboro/Blender Tips:
- keep the number of leaves low 4-6 you can always duplicate them later in Blender
- keep the leaves simple with disk1 or disk2 shapes (this means 1 or 2 faces per leaf and it goes up to 9)
- keep the curve resolution low (under 10) on every branch level, again, you can subdivide or subsurf in Blender
- By altering the seed number in the export screen you can make different versions of the same type of tree.
I mapped the leaves with the texture below with the blank area set to a 0 alpha trying to make each leaf, well, leaf shapped, but the texture doesn’t seem to match up with the orientation of each leaf. Anybody know how to flat map an image with transparency to an object with faces going every which way? Hmmm… this was not the quick reply I thought it was going to be <grin>
Leaf Texture:
Bark Texture:
Thanks for the posts. these will really come in use. I am making a game with a tropical island setting. do you know A good way of making grass? for a game engine. If I could I would like to have grass like farcrys, but it porbly wont happen even with the ogre engine.