Anim8or Community
General Category => General Anim8or Forum => Topic started by: CoriDavis on August 12, 2010, 01:58:07 pm
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Sorry everyone, i'm probably annoying all of you with all of these topics by now. But anyway, does anyone have any tips or tutorials on making trees? I'm trying to get a Pirates of the Caribbean like feel, so should I do palm trees? regular trees? maybe both? Either way, i'll need some advice for tree-modeling.
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what about this (i didnt tried yet):
you add a cylinder. then you add some planes diagonally to each other, like a star.
the texture for the planes is green as example(im colorblind...) with an alpha map.
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umm... ok... so I assume you're describing a palm tree, like the cylinder is the trunk and the star is the leaves? hmm... that could work. with some work I could fix up something like that to make it more realistic.
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I think he means on each plane you make them green and add a transmap to make it look more like leaves.
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ok... I guess, i'm still a bit confused
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hello Cori in the old days there was a god called MP3d wwho had a site full of wonderful anim8or tutorials but alas it is gone
a transmap is a texture that you put in your transmap channel. Everything that is black from memory will be invisable. Everything that is white will be visable. Grey is half visable. So you can put a green colour in your ambient texture channel/colour channel and a black and white silhoette of a leaf or branch of leaves in the transparency channel and you will just have green shape where the transmap lets it. (Ie the white part of the map) heh sounds like googygoop.
Just have a play. You'll be right.
check out this: transmaps are also alpha maps here we have lots of black and white silhoettes of leafs etc -t they are transmaps
http://www.google.com.au/images?hl=en&source=imghp&biw=1280&bih=642&q=leaf+alpha+map&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
read this part of the manual and it will all be clear maybe http://www.anim8or.com/manual/10_materials.html
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oooh ok! I see! yeah, I could do that. I had a game a while ago that I never play anymore that had trees like that. they looked realistic, only if I found a glitch that put me above the trees, I could see that it was just two images crossed over. so, since i'm not going to have any arial views near the trees, nobody will ever know....
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check this link out 3dCoat tree generator
http://www.animanon.com/Forum3/index.php?topic=423.0
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I tried making an account on the site, but it's not letting me, so I can't exactly see it. is there an alternate link to it?
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You shouldn`t need to make an account ... I just tried the link as a guest and its working fine...are you on a proxy ??? as proxies are disallowed on animanon.
This is the direct link to the tree generator ....
http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=1003
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That's odd, unless somehow there's a proxy I don't know about. but thanks for the link!
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well, I tried to make my palm tree using the Alpha method, but I can't figure it out. I followed the instructions on the manual, and I got the ball in the corner to work successfully, but it won't work on the model, what did I forget?
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here is a sample for you to look over , I hav`nt UV`d all the fronds perhaps you might have a stab at the rest!
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hmm, not bad, this one was the one I made
(http://i33.tinypic.com/23kadqu.gif)
yours looked more realistic. anyway, what happened was, it was perfectly transparent background on the ball with the green leaf, but when I tried to put it on the model, it was just the black and white picture.
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Did you use the uv tool to align/Scale it to the mesh? Is the colourmap of the leaf in the same orientation/size??
Thats why its more than likely just blackand white
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Both is set up fine, I used the same picture for the Diffuse and the Transparent, so yes, they are the same. I even used the new frond picture and I UV'd it, but it's still black and white with the example ball in the corner exactly how I want it.
(http://i36.tinypic.com/16hkvu8.jpg)
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don't you set diffuse 0, or am I mistaken?
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Have you rendered the image?..... It won`t show until you actually render the scene.
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Oh yeah, that's a major part of it. Rendering.
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aww... you mean I have to render it? great... will it be transparent in the rendered movie?
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it should be.
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Yes! the render worked! I was afraid to do it seeing how I kind of ruined my file trying to render that walking bird tutorial. I have plenty of backups for this file, so I have plenty of tries to get it right and I can just copy more if I need to.
but can anyone tell me specifically each step of rendering a movie? the manual just says "you can do this with this tool..." and gives no further info. I don't want to mess this up.
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Wait, so you don't know how to render?
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I tried to follow the rendering instructions on the tutorial, I guess I didn't select the right thing or something, and it messed it up. now when I try to render it again, I get this message... wait a minute... it's working!!! ok, that's cool and strange at the same time, I wonder what I did wrong the first time.
Anyway, here's what the video looks like. why is it so.. Pixel-ey and nasty-smudgey? I guess I could choose a different setting to fix it
http://tinypic.com/r/5cdjkx/4
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Wait, i saw no trees in this but whatever... It's smudgy probably not because of the renderer, but because it has to compress the file before saving it, which reduces the video quality.
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that's not my current file, that was from the tutorial, I used it as an example. i'll post my tree when it's finished. you can see the rest of my progress in this board, http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php?topic=3553.0 the tree is for scenery
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Here is my rendered tree!
(http://i36.tinypic.com/vcrk3k.jpg)
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Wow, the tree looks very nice!
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thanks, it has a billion polys though. I didn't even subdivide except in the top, even then, I deleted the lines to make alternating squares to make peak-faces for those spikes.
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Seems like it could been done with a lot less polys.... Just a tree? couldn't have taken that many polys. How long was the render time?
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Glad you got it working ok, now.... just goes to show that you really need to render it before you say it does not work LOL!!
remember with any alpha you won`t see the result until its rendered!
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it was just an exaggeration. I don't know how many polys is considered "a lot" or how to count them. the render time was okay, i'm about to post my video, look for it in the "creations, works in progress" board
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to count all that stuff just go to Options->Info
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oh ok
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With your leaves being mapped and all, you probably don't need to subdivide them, you could probably just use a rectangle that is divided through its width a few times and have it curved. However, then you would have problems with the shadow, which will then be a rectangle, so you can use the knife tool to cut along the image of the transparency map and delete the outer points. Also, I've noticed that if you have too many transparent faces in a line that the camera sees, (if they are transparency mapped), when rendered, you end up with the areas that are exposed to be transparent being black. I don't know if it has to do with the ART Renderer (cause thats the one I used, I should try the scanline and see if that fixes it... ;)), If it is, I would expect it to do something with the maximum reflection value for the rays (which I can't seem to find :-[), but I digress :P. That should help with the poly count anyway, and you may be able to find a way to excape the issue of the black areas. Oh, and if you want the transparency map to take effect without rendering, go to view->preferences, and you should have a option under the name of "transparency" or something like that (I'm not on a computer with Anim8or or I'd check for the exact name), and you can turn it on. That should get it working. Sorry for my tiresome monologue, but I hope this helps ;).
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yeah, what I did for the leaves, I made an ovel with pointed tips (a leaf shape) and I cut it through to make it bend. It only added up to 1000-something polys, is that a lot?
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Not if you ask me. It seems way over for just a tree, but models like that don't need to be high poly in the first place, especially since they're background objects where they don't neede much detail.