Blender 3d: Modeling Realistic Trees
Monday, November 17, 2008
Today, I think I'll make a tutorial about modeling trees in Blender 3d. Maybe its not so much of a real tutorial, but more of an introduction to a plugin.
For this tutorial, I assume you know some Blender 3d basics. (You should know how to render, add new meshes, add materials, etc.)
Now, take a look at this render. (Sorry for the unrealistic environment, as I could not find a good background. )
If you have noticed clearly, the shape of the tree looks almost real but rather complex!
So organic, so many branches, so many leaves spreading out in almost life like randomness!!
BUT, what if I tell you that actually, I modeled it within just 2 minutes?
Let me introduce you to a blender plugin called the tree generator. It uses a special algorithm to generate life like models of trees. You can download it here.
Once you have finsihed downloading the plugin, unzip it, and copy the gen3.py and the gt folder into you blender scripts folder. The default folder should be C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts .
Now, in Blender 3d, go to the scripts window at the bottom panel.
Then, click on Scripts and go to Misc -> Gen3 . (That's the tree generator script)
If everything went perfectly, you should see many controls appear in the panel. For this tutorial, I will use an preset called Black Tupelo. Click on the Black Tupelo button and click Generate! (Generating will take a while. It took me about 1 minute for my 3.2 GHz PC. For those with slower machines, please be patient.)
Congratulations! You have just modeled a very life like tree in a couple of minutes!! Now, you may want to add some color to it.
You can actually select the leaves and branches separately and give them a touch of color. As for the leaves, I used 78A75b for the Color, A8C082 for the Spec, 0.58 for Ref, 0.29 for Spec, and 133 for hard. Other settings are left at default.
You have to create a new material for the trunk and branches. I used 674E1B for the Color, 0.80 for Ref, 0.09 for Spec, and 133 for Hard.
As such, this tutorial has reached its end. I hope that you can find this tree generator useful in other projects that require you to make trees.
Possible improvements you can try out:
- If you are comfortable with Blender materials, you may want to improve from my settings. I believe that almost every material can be made to be more realistic. Maybe you can tweak the colors to be more accurate or add textures, for that extra lifelike-ness.
- Try playing around with the settings for the tree generator. Maybe, you can make your ideal tree by tweaking the values. You can also decrease the quality of the tree model if you feel that the presets are too much for your computer to take.
- People with very powerful computers can even generate many more trees and make a whole forest out of it. Unfortunately, about 10 trees are enough to bring my machine down to her knees.
Labels: Blender 3d, Graphic Tutorials
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