There are a lot of trees in Sheffield (we have had some controversy around this of late) – and thankfully we have groups like STAG (Sheffield Tree Action Group) who are doing wonderful things to help keep those numbers up, and prevent them from being unnecessarily felled by our council.
There’s a new addition to the top menu, Wiki.
This’ll be an explorable Wikipedia-a-like of the story-line of the game, and any future projects connected to this universe. It’s based on a series of stories I’ve written before, so the information available will fill up quickly, and will not detract from progress on the 3D modelling front.
I digress. The most obvious place to house afformentioned trees would be a building where a range of interesting plant life can be found, the Winter Gardens (you’ll be glad to know that in 2030, it still serves the same purpose)
But first, let’s have a look at this tree:
Sketchfab model
Winter Gardens foliage area
Tree generation
I’ve naturally tried to find a Blender plugin that would help with creating trees, and there are some available, but they are paid plugins.
If possible, I want to avoid this – keeping with the ethos of this site: a shoestring budget studio.
If there’s a resource out there for free that does some of the work for me, saving time and money – I’ll take that, thanks!
My search for a free Blender plugin turned out to be fruitless (pun intended!) and I look towards free, specialised software instead – and came across Abraro; and was suitably impressed.
Almost every aspect of the tree is customisable, so you can let the Charles Darwin within you loose, and create any kind of tree you can imagine like a mad scientist genetic botanist.
Once you have created your tree – click File -> Export and save it as an .obj file on your computer: you can then import it into Blender either as a new object, or straight into your scene.
When first importing the tree, it did put a strain on my (limited) graphics card, and I would get areas like this across the Blender application, which as you can imagine made it quite awkward to use:
I used the Decimate modifier on it to reduce its poly count from around 29,000 to 1,500.
Not only does this lessen system resources, it also makes it more
appropriate for a game asset.
I’ve only included this image because the crash makes it looks Vaporwave.
Not all models work, this is overly detailed and results in lots of rogue mesh, though you can see the actual shape of the tree in orange.
Below, I’ve modified the trunk and shape of a Black Tupelo so that it is shorter and more bush-like, and experimented with the leaves.
It turned out massive and soon after loading, Blender gave up and shut itself down: this’ll have to be something I branch into once I’ve upgraded to a higher spec PC.
The tree with its leaves enabled.
Some renders!
Some slight colour modification in GIMP, no changes to the actual content of the model.
These have been scaled down by your web browser to make it fit the screen on your device, but you can right click the image, and open it in a new tab to see it full size: mobile users can usually press and hold their finger down on the picture to open in a new tab, which will allow you to pinch and zoom around it.
Tonights render queue
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