Hi! Help me, because I have very BIG problem! I am building small town model in maya, witch I am going to export to Virtools later. My problem is the tree. It has many polygons, and there is many trees! If someone can tell me how to create a simple 3d tree (made from 2d shapes), I will be very happy! Or, you can send me a tree, my e mail adress is beli.pastuv@gmail.com
Make the trunk (save polygons, i have never seen a smooth tree trunk in any game before...they're all edgy, to save some polygons), then some very lowpoly branches(they wil be almost fully covered by 'leafs'). Then make some planes (one plane one quad usually, but sometimes to get them bent and twisted you may want to use more)And place them onto the tree. Apply transparency map and green texture to it. The transparency map should be something like lots of random dots so that when you look from far away into the plane it looks like there is a huge mass of leaves. Depending on the trans map and textures it can get quite realistic.
Notice that there are no separate leaves, just planes that are textured to look like lots of leves.
Sorry my english is not that good! Tell me what did you mean when you wrote PLANES. I can't find it in any dicionary! If you can please upload file with tree or send me e mail with it. THANK YOU
Plane is big (or small, whatever size) FLAT surface. I cant find enough time today, but i think i will have some tomorrow, so i will upload the file then.
Aigh, here is the model, just download it soon because it will get deleted seven days after i have uploaded it (i uploaded it today)
http://www.filefactory.com/file/0864b4/
did no texturing and stuff like that, to save some time. What you do is create a plane and do a planar projection of it to get the uv map which you will later use to texture your tree. I assume you know how to create transparency (a.k.a alpha) images and textures using 'photoshop' or 'gimp' or 'ms paint' or anything like that.. If not, then let me know and i will help you with that to..