I’m kinda new here, but not entirely new to blender, been using it on and off for about a year now.
Anyways, my latest project is working on a scene for a custom christmas card, one that I need to make a decent pine tree (christmas tree) for the center of the scene, so it needs to look decent. But instead of going out on the net and finding a pre-modeled one and just using it, I wanted to try and make my own, without having to model every needle of it
I know of the lsystem script that I’ve seen in a few other tree posts on here, but I haven’t been able to get the lsystem to generate a very good looking pine tree. Maybe I haven’t run across the right settings yet, or maybe it’s not entirely possible to do a good pine tree using it, also, there’s no leaf object with it that makes a pine needle instead of a regular leaf.
Anyways, I was wondering if anyone else has modeled pine trees in blender, or found a script or anything that has worked for this, or if I’ll end up just having to either use a stock one from a free 3d model website, or use one of those and modify it a bit to my needs. I’d like to do one myself though if possible (and I can get it done before december hits, so I have time to get my cards out).
Plant Studio is a plant (shrubs, bushes. etc.) generator that will help you fill in the rest of your landscape after you get that pine tree planted. Good Luck.
The best looking pine tree I have ssen was not really a modeled tree. It is a tree from from the application Forester. It is really a stack of cones, each textured with a branch pattern image. The space between branches is alpha channel and transparent. If you go to the forester objects page, you can download the tree file. You will have to convert it, I believe I used the ter2Blend script to do that _ Gets pretty complicated if you are not familiar with it. I suggest looking at the image map files to get an idea of how the images are mapped (circular) onto a cone. The model once again is just a series of stacked cones. It is the images that make the tree.
I would be very interested in that mini-tutorial for those pine trees. Those ones looked great. How long did they take to model? Were they very hard to do or not?
I did see the forrester models before, but thought they looked a tad bit confusing to convert, although that would come in handy possibly for projects down the road.
Thanks for the help everyone! Hope sometime I can give some advice myself, when I get more skilled at blender
You could accomplish what you want with the L-system tree script. I messed around with the settings and came up with this definition: ftp://ftp.fireengine51.org/pub/pine.def. However, generating all those pine needles exceeded Blender’s current vertex limit for a single mesh so I ended up with a garbled mess. It shouldn’t be too hard for Blender Dungeon to modify the code to create subsequent mesh objects though.
By the way, all the leaves are stored on layer 3. Since a pine needle doesn’t really need a texture, just create a new mesh object and name it ‘p’ and then put in ‘p’ for the leaf type in the script.
I’ll haveta take a look at that pine tree def tonight. Thanks for the tip on how to change the leaves.
Too bad about the mesh vertices limit, I think that explains why I wasn’t able to import some 3ds models of pine trees, they’d look all garbled when I tried importing them. Hopefully Blender Dungeon will continue work on the lsystem script, it’s proving to be very useful, and would be nice to have additional features.
Still patiently waiting on that mini-tut for the other pine trees
