This is a concept i’ve been working on after christmas. These are just a few renders that i have come up with so far. I still need to work on the modelling of the supports, tree and furniture. Then i can start texturing the whole thing… 
(not lookin forward to that -lol i hate texturing). This is my second serious project so i really would appreciate some constructive criticism.
Happy New Year!
I was tring to work out how to model the leaves - here’s a test render. I created an object and randomly placed afew mesh circles in it, then used dupliverts to position duplicates of the object around the branches.
Ill probably use this technique, though Im trying to look for a better way to make the leaves abit more realistic however. Their shape is abit poor at the moment.
I am planning to use the idea posted on othe threads to do the leaves of makeing planes with an alpha-mapped leaf texture. This will bemuch more efficient than the method i showed above with mesh circles.
Ok, i hope this makes sense :D. I tried to duplivert a dupliverted object to see if i could maybe speed up the texturing of the leaves, rather than having to UV map the whole set of planes that i am going to use for the each “bunch” of leaves. It didn’t quite work… I think ill have to try the hard way.
If anyone knows a better way id appreachiate it if you helped me out.
have a look at the leave generated by the l-system tree script. I never took the time to figure out how it works, but it works well.
http://www.geocities.com/blenderdungeon/lsystem/index.html
Your tree house looks great.
Thanks, its great to get some feed back.
Yeah, i’ve looked at the tree generators promoted on this forum, but the trouble is that the seem all randomly generated. Thats why i have been attemopting to create the tree from scratch. If i was creating a forest or a garden, going the way of a tree generator would be fine, but for this it needs to be precise.
Thanks for the link though, now that i think about it, I might use it for the other trees in the rest of the scene.
I was abit bored this afternoon so i just did a render of the telescope. You can see up the top of the frame that im starting to build a canopy above the platform. It took around eight minutes to render probably becaus of the large area light above. Sorry about the garish lighting in my renders, i was bored on New Year’s day so i played around with different lighting styles. Its supposed to look as if its late afternoon :rolleyes:*
*expression denotes embarassment at the stupidity of the lighting setup
bjzaba -
Hope this doesn’t come out all nit-picky…
IMHO, the tree limbs are oversized relative to the trunk. I wish I could be more specific than that but they just look way oversized. I suppose it really depends on the species of tree.
The telescope could use a little bit of smoothing to get rid of the hexagonal front end “set smooth” will do wonders but subsurfing drives it home.
The toilet suspended over empty space. Are you daft? Guests just won’t stop by very often when… things… come flying out of the air at them from the heavens. Plus you get a chilly backdraft on cold winter nights, if you catch my meaning.
And if you figure out the leaf problem, let ME know, will you?
I’m very interested in seeing the room just below the observation deck (bedroom?) and kitchen. I’m partial to japanese architecture, so if you do the room by the deck that way with shoji screens and everything… way cool. Just a thought.
Being the penultimate scaredy-cat when it comes to heights, how do people go from point A (safe ground) to point B (off the safe ground) to point C (hanging on a tire by a rope way off the ground), etc.? Yeah, I see stairs, but how do you DO it? Valium is our friend, valium is our friend, valium is our friend.
-critter
I’ll try to resize those branches and make them abit thinner - thanks for the tip, I look at them now and laugh.
The telescope wasnt originally meant to be seen close up so i intentionally left it low-poly.
I was going to include a pipe leading down from the toilet to ground level, but i seem to have forgotten it in the process - thanks for that pickup. About the cold winter nights, I guess the’ll have to eaither rug-up or bring a thick wooly blanket ;).
About the room - it wasn’t actually intended to be japanese - more of a sub-tropical design (i live in brisbane, australia, see). In my next post ill get an interior render to you. OH! I just worked out what you meant yeah ill try the screens with the lounge room and see how it looks.
Just one thing, can you see the couch ok? Or is it too obscured 
?
Thanks very much for the criticism,
bjzaba
Here’s a Render of the inside of the bedroom, as requested by Critter - sorry its not finished yet - i figured it wouldnt be seen, but i might add an armchair or cupboard (i might even attach a broom cupboard onto the tree somewhere :D) later.
Hey great work on the tree house its going great since the last time i saw it. It should be visualy stunning when fully compleated and rendered with the proper rendering program. Keep up the good work zabbo.
This is usually how I do low-poly leafs, I use a quads and then uv-map a leaftexture on it and use the alpha channel to mask it out. It can basically be done with any kind of leaf texture. Here is a quicky to show an example. The leaf texture is hazel and I know it isn’t clean hence the white edge.
Yeah thats what i was going to try (i saw a tute on the wiki) - its good to se that it actually works using UV maps :D. Um the thing is, are the double sided? I mean if i start dupliverting the leafs around the tree will you see an un-textured face?
They have the same texture on both sides. You can choose double or single in edit. For me UV’s has allways showed up on both sides so I think double is the standard config.
Nice progress on the tree house. A suggestion on the leaves:
I recommend shaping the mesh planes the leaves will be mapped to. Maybe create 10 deformed shapes that your duplivert. Even when far away from the model, flat planes simply do not look like real leaves, same with uniform size and shape.
Again, good work with what you have so far and wishing you the best with the texturing, I’m facing that hurdle myself.
Thanks for your help with the leaf problem and your comments here’s just a render of where im up to modelling-wise. I think ill tackle the leaf problem next - im getting trired of modelling all the time :D. You’ll notice that i have changed the lightitng - it disabled the area light - even at it’s lowest energy it was way too bright. I just used a sun with AO set to the colour of the sky (which was a light blue).
Here is a test render without the model and just a test object for the leaves (they’re only simple planes at the moment - sorry Soter). Im struggling to figure out how to get rid of the artifacts where the trunk meets the leaves :(. Apart from that im happy - the UV mapping wasnt too hard and it’ll be easy to do it again for a more complex leaf object :).
Btw pleas dont be too hard on the placement of the leaves - i know the dont go on the brances :rolleyes: - it was a quick test.
My best advice would be to not have the leafs directly on those thick branches, usually leafs sit on smaller twigs, that from a distance is clouded with leafs. Here are two images illustrating it. Allthough this really depends if you want it to have a realistic look. Your current approach with only thick branches have more of a cartoonish feel to it.
http://www.english-country-garden.com/a/i/trees/hazel-5.jpg
A schematic on how the smalle twigs spread from a bigger one:
Good luck with whatever method you use.
Here’s an update - most of the leaves are in the correct place - though it seems I must left some in funny locations :o. Thanks for the reference pics. I think ill have to work on the placement of the top-most clump, it looks abit strange.
Looks much better than ur first… though try to add different hues on the leafs to get a more realistic color mix in the tree.
I see what you mean. What would be the easiest/best way to achieve that? A procedual maybe? By the way, I nothiced that my settings for the specular on the leaf texture was wrong - it made the planes show up when the light hit them… i’ll post a render with the updated leaf texture and a try of a prodedual texture soon.
