trees

wat is the best way to make trees (with leaves) with blender?

With textured polygon-based meshes.

There are some freeware programs that generate them automatically, and then you can import the files into Blender. I found one a long time ago called TreeMake, hold out for someone who has done it recently enough to have links, or search with google for “free 3d tree generator” or something like that until you get results.

i usually use an alpha leaf for the leaves

i also use the game engine…

There’s always Lsystem, but thats kind of a quicky way, that sometimes feels kind of cheap if you’ve put a lot of work into the rest of the scene.

Definitely model it, and if I remember right there is a tree modelling tutorial for max, that is somewhat applicable to blender at 3dtotal. It may be worth a look over.

I won’t be too negative on L-system, if you tweak its value carefully, expecially Prune, you get fairly good results.

It is good for ‘hybrid’ modelling too.

Model 3 or 4 small trees with it and use them as brances of a bigger tree, whose trunk you model by hand, so to have better results

Stefano

i left a bunch of lsystem presets in python and plugins somewhere,…also, a good way to make trees: make a long tapered cylinder,…make a bunch of loop cuts,…put an armature in it,…duplicate the mesh and armature,…bend it around,…use the ‘apply_def’ script on it,(for some reason i have to rename the deformed object or it crashes the script if i make another one),…put it off to the side,…go back to original and repeat.
THEN,…make your trunk just by making the whole thing bigger,…to place the branches,…position them at the attitude you want,…select the trunk,…go into edit mode,…select the vertice nearest where you want the branch to go,…use shift S to snap the cursor to that vertice,…(oh yeah, you’ll want to make sure that, with your branches, you go into edit mode,…select all verts, and adjust them so that the center sits at the base of the branch if it isn’t there already. ) ,…then select the branch in object mode, and again shift S to snap the object to the cursor. when you have the basic structure, you can put in the smaller branches basically the same way,…just duplicate the large ones, stick some leaves on them, and place them the same way as with the other ones.
here’s an example…
http://home.att.net/~moton-toybox/treeexample.jpg

Here are some links to programs that make trees:
http://www.treemaker.nl/
http://membres.lycos.fr/treegenerator/
Here is a link to a page where you can get a program that makes plants:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/index.htm
Most of these export to a .dxf. As I remember, Blender can import PlantStudio’s .dxf, but I had to use a converting program (like Crossroads) to import the other two’s trees. I hope that this is useful to you.