Trees

[adamrw91]

anyone know a good way to make realistic trees?
im working on setting up some scenes for this year's animation chalenge.
any help would be awsome. and i dont really want to use the ones built into
3ds max.

[Kevin Thorp]

Do you not want to use the trees that come with Max because you don't like the way they look or because you think that would be "cheating"?

I think it would be okay to use all the tools that come with Max, including the trees.

But a couple years ago we created trees by just making some planes and applying tree photograph texture maps. The maps had a transparent alpha so the trees didn't look square. We used a coulple different maps and resized & mirrored them to add a little variety.

The planes were at a right-angle to the camera so they didn't look flat. If your camera moves it's more of a challenge. You could use 2 planes at a right-angle (a cross from the top view). That sort of looks good to a moving camera.

[Gamer930]

I think it would be okay to use all the tools that come with Max, including the trees.


Is there a tree plugin that comes with 3ds max?? I been looking for it and haven't found one in the standard package.

Did a Google search and the only ones I found cost like $500. They did look very nice, but that isn't included in our budget

[adamrw91]

Do you not want to use the trees that come with Max because you don't like the way they look or because you think that would be "cheating"?.

I dont really like the ones included with 3ds max. and i also dont really want to just add pictures and opacity maps to planes. id rather have another way.

any ideas?

[BuddyB309]

I dont really like the ones included with 3ds max. and i also dont really want to just add pictures and opacity maps to planes. id rather have another way.

any ideas?

If you want to know how to make some trees you have come to the right place. First off I congratulate you for realizing that the trees that come with 3ds max are really really bad. (like the biped, which is a horrible character rig to use) Ok, sorry about that, I view it as my purpose on chiefdelphi is to educate everyone the pains that come with the biped.

First off, Get it out of your head that you can make realistic looking trees in time for the AVA award. I'm not saying that you don't have the capability, I'm saying that the time frame that autodesk gives you, is too short. Realistic looking trees take way way way too much time to make. Is it possible? yes, Is it worth it? My answer is no, because you would have spent all of your time on a backgound object and no time on your foreground.
When i say realistic looking trees i mean that you have the bark, every individual branch, every leaf, the color exactly, the ones that they make at dreamworks or pixar. They have teams of people working non-stop around the clock to generate those types of trees. It's very hard to have that kind of manpower in a animation team in FIRST.

If you are smart about it, you can make some pretty darn good looking trees. Think of your style of your animation, If you have a cartoony characters but realistic looking trees, Wont they look out of place? as opposed to cartoony trees and cartoony characters?

Check out some trees in some our animations.

AVA 2007 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03opcTOLMGo)

http://img104.imageshack.us/img104/250/lastframeyb2.png
They arn't realistic looking but they fit the syle of the animation. As does this picture with these trees.

http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/4418/camera01final0000100lr3.jpg
You can clearly see how the trees were made. It works because these trees are in the background and you dont need to see every single individual leaf.

[ea6b607]

I'm going to have to disagree on this with you buddy. It's quite simple to make good looking trees in not a whole lot of time (about an hour). Here is a great tutorial for it http://3dm3.com/tutorials/tree/ I will warn that they can get pretty high poly so keep that in mind.

[BuddyB309]

I'm going to have to disagree on this with you buddy. It's quite simple to make good looking trees in not a whole lot of time (about an hour). Here is a great tutorial for it http://3dm3.com/tutorials/tree/ I will warn that they can get pretty high poly so keep that in mind.

Yes, you can make a really nice looking tree, I never said that you couldn't. But you must take into account if it is worth it. Do you really want your computer to spend more than an hour rendering out the bunch of trees in the background even when they are going to be blurred? Just look at some paintings, the artist could have spent hours making detailed trees in a painting but they don't, why? because they are not the central focus of the animation. You do not want to distract the viewers away from what is really important.

Now if your tree is in the foreground, or it is the central focus of the animation then by all means go nuts! If you want a to make a tree character or a shot of a specific tree that you want to show the viewers then pour as much detail into it as necessary, but the trees in the background should be basic. Because they are only background elements, that only add to the atmosphere of the scene.

[ea6b607]

I agree completely that it is not necessary in all situations, but am merely stating that it does not actually take long to make them. Oh buddy by the way are you using camera angle dof in that or are you just using the lens effects dof. Looks pretty nice for the lens effect dof.

[BuddyB309]

I agree completely that it is not necessary in all situations, but am merely stating that it does not actually take long to make them. Oh buddy by the way are you using camera angle dof in that or are you just using the lens effects dof. Looks pretty nice for the lens effect dof.

Neither, I Render out a separate layer called Z-depth using render elements. Then i bring the two layers into a third party program and use the Z-depth as a mask to tell the Gaussian blur how much is each pixel is blurred. Its so much faster than using any of the blurs in 3ds max, Instead of rendering the scene 12 times to get the effect, The Z-depth layer doesn't not require GI, Final gather, or any lighting, materials, or anything else of that matter, only objects and the gray scale value is determined from the distance they are with the camera.

[ea6b607]

Makes sense, very useful information, but would that get messed up by transparent elements in front of the object. It is done essentially the same way the camera lens effect is done in max (which is also incredibly fast), but the camera lens effect gives a lot of problems with transparency and reflections and such.

[BuddyB309]

Makes sense, very useful information, but would that get messed up by transparent elements in front of the object. It is done essentially the same way the camera lens effect is done in max (which is also incredibly fast), but the camera lens effect gives a lot of problems with transparency and reflections and such.

then the transparent object and the reflections are rendered out in separate layers. With reflections you need the beauty pass without reflections, then just reflections, then you need a reflection mask. Then you can blur the reflection separately or even change the color if you want. All done in the third party.

[ea6b607]

Thanks, ya I'm good at modeling and texturing, but when it comes to everything else, I still need to do some research.

[Sergio]

http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/tree/tree1.asp

i found this useful. easy way to model trees and doesn't look half bad.

[adamrw91]

Well i found a cool max script called speed tree and with a few tweaks i came out with these and they look good!
http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o297/adamrw91/SPEEDTREE.jpg
:D

grass looks like crap though. im going to fix that soon

[adamrw91]

hey when you render out a z-depth pass what program do u use with the blur?

[BuddyB309]

hey when you render out a z-depth pass what program do u use with the blur?

adobe after effects

[pyr0b0y]

try speedtree, it works pretty well and is realistic

[adamrw91]

speed tree is comercial. and costs like 200$
im not rich
lol
unless i used a an illegal copy.
but i would never do that.
cough*

[Setsanto]

My thoughts entirely. It would be nice if we were able to get some commercial plugins for free or at least at a discounted price...

~Setsanto

[pyr0b0y]

well we get grants specifically for animation, try hitting up some companies to give you like a month subscription, plus there is always the trial period, where you just put all ur energy into modelling trees.

[Kevin Thorp]

On the entry form Autodesk asks what other software you used in addition to Max. I don't know if plug-ins are allowed or not, but I'll bet they'll give more points to a team that modeled their own trees vs. teams that used a plug-in.

Here are some more tree tutorials. Some are not specifically done in Max, but the same principals apply:

http://www.andyzibits.com/tut_low_poly_trees.html
http://reinerstileset.4players.de/handshaped_3d_treeE.htm
http://bk-coffeehouse.cottages.polycount.com//tut/realtimetree1.html
http://www.vterrain.org/Plants/Create/index.html

[addictedMax]

SNIP TREESPete you didnt even talk about my animation? We had a scene with a lot of trees, we used the Max trees. It was 5.8 million polys. Max trees eat render times and poly counts.

[BuddyB309]

Pete you didnt even talk about my animation? We had a scene with a lot of trees, we used the Max trees. It was 5.8 million polys. Max trees eat render times and poly counts.

Tom, your talking about Eco bot. Your sky dome was a sky "box" I rest my case with 3ds max tree not looking like any trees. You can produce better dreams than what comes with max.