Artistic Trees In Blender

trees so i need to make some artistic trees for a project and these ones are great they can move they can be crooked they can be weird they can fly they can even be used in the painting so yeah let's make some trees so the first thing i'll do here is create a plane go into edit mode and then i want to merge all the vertices so i'll press m and merge at center now we have a single vertice in the middle then i'll extrude those things up and we start creating a sort of tree trunk for our tree here and i'll just branch these things out and these will become sort of the branches of our tree here we're just looking to create some sort of organic structure here and just warp everything a little bit to get a little bit of that organicness back okay and here comes the magic we're gonna select our tree here and then we're gonna jump over to the modifiers panel and we're gonna turn on a skin modifier now a skin modifier will add some geometry and thickness to our edges here and that's super handy and if we jump back into edit mode and turn on ghost mode we can see our edges are still in there and now we can control the thickness of each of these branches by pressing ctrl a and then shrinking everything in and if you're using the soft selection modifier here or the soft select option then you can do multiple at a time and we'll just shrink everything in so it becomes a little bit more thin like this but everything's a bit too square right now so i'll also add a subdivision surface modifier to our tree here like that boom then it's a bit more rounded you might get these little glitchy areas here you can fix those by just kind of moving them sometimes or you know moving the individual branches like this and giving a little more space and we can still modify our tree is we can bring it back to the center here doing something like this add an additional vertice here in the middle to another branch something like that all these things and ctrl a to scale then the next we want to do is we want to take our branch trunk thing here and do a circular array of it around the center here so what we'll do is we'll collapse these modifiers here and turn on an array modifier and we'll turn off the relative offset and then we'll create an empty and then the idea is to use this empty to array our object around and here's important that your tree and your empty has the origin in the same space so we'll jump to our tree here and we'll go to object offset turn it on and select the bar empty and then now if i start rotating my empty the tree will array in a circular way so i'll take my tree here and give it a few more arrays i think i'll create five then i'll take my empty here and just rotate it around like that and we're starting to have that awesome tree shape there then i can just jump in and start modifying my tree trunk here so i'll do something like this and this is really the awesome part of this method is that you always have access to these vertices and you can still manipulate the overall shape of the tree so i'll find some sort of pattern here that i like some kind of distribution i think maybe i'm gonna bring everything in like that and i feature i often see lacking when people are making trees are the roots and roots are really great things to put on your trees because it just makes your trees so much more flexible because quite often you know dirt and earth has been ripped up in the ground and roots just help you know really add the realism to the trees and can look really nice on their own so to add to our things here i'll just start extruding out the bottom here and create some sort of root system and i can just do the same as i did before cool and now i'm more or less happy with the overall shape and look of my tree and then i want to adjust some bigger movements in the tree and we can once again come to the modifiers panel here so add a modifier and i will add a simple deform modifier now the simple deform modifier is really neat it allows us to kind of just twist everything at once so by default it's set untwist and i'll set it to twist along the set axis here and then we create this twisting motion around the tree and it just creates that natural twist that we see quite often in trees and it just looks really really neat we could add a additional simple deform here go simple deform and then turn on the bend modifier instead and this is really cool because now we can start bending our trees in different ways if you're starting to get any kind of nasty deforming using these modifiers then you can take your subdivision modifier and just pull it all the way down and then things will just sort of pop back up because then the subdivision is happening afterwards to bring back some of the organicness of your tree you can go to modifiers and then you can add a remesh modifier so i'll jump over to the voxel size here and this is really just trial and error to see what works for you i will try something like 0.2 you might be getting a little bit of floaty things you can always just you know dial it down but that will increase the overall mesh density here then now we're starting to really get that merging of the different branches here in the tree now i am more or less happy with the overall shape of my tree but i do not like this repetitiveness we're getting from the array so i think i will apply the array i will grab the array here select it and apply so that becomes applied here and then now i can jump into edit mode on these different branches turn on ghost and then i can adjust the individual branches here and i can really just create a lot more organicness by just twisting and turning these different areas and really create a different sense of the tree we could even have the remesh modifier be on at the same time like we can see live how the trees are affecting each other here and what's great about this method is that we can just grab a tree duplicate it and create a whole new tree by just twisting and turning everything and it's looking sad huh but it looks cool we can also add some materials to a tree so we'll grab over our panel here switch it to the shader editor i'll create a new material then i'll grab some textures i like to use textures from texturehaven.com this is where it gets really interesting i'll put in my diffuse here and plug it into my base color then we start seeing something here but we don't really have any uvs on our mesh but if we have the node wrangler installed in blender and press ctrl t then we get a little texture coordinate and a mapping node here and we'll plug in the object instead into the vector switch from flat to box and then we'll blend everything a little bit and boom we have nice tree texture on our tree and then we can bring in a roughness map and a bump map to enhance everything easy peasy and then i'll come over here because i want to have some sort of control over the scale of the texture so i'll create a vector math and switch this to scale and then i'll plug that into scale i set everything to one and now we have one slider for controlling the scale of our tree texture here and it just works on this tree as well without having to do anything our tree is looking pretty good so far we also want to give it some life so let's add some leaves to do this we'll create a new plane now create a new material we'll call this our leaves and then you have to find some sort of leaf texture preferably with the transparent background i have a texture here a sort of branch texture that looks like this where the black parts are actually an alpha you can see the alpha here like so i'll take that and plug it into the alpha and then i will grab my principal pstf out for the material properties and then turn on the blend mode alpha clip because i want a harsh transition and also do the same for the shadows here so now if i view my material then the black part should be completely transparent and i can adjust the clip threshold like so to make everything a little bit more sharp like this then i'll put in my color here to my base color then i'll extract some normal subsurface and bump from our leaves here and here we have our leafy branch with some subsurface on it so now what i want to do is i want to use this to create little clusters that we can scatter around our tree then i'll grab everything and subdivide them once then i'll go over to the randomize option here and just pull everything out just to give it a little bit of randomization and it'll make sure it's shade smooth and duplicate it around on my tree just making the branches roughly point out the way they were pointing out before scale them a little bit here and there for variation and congratulations you're done with the tree i will just make a couple more in another scene and just you know scatter them around and you know some are crooked some are weird some are big and sprouting with life and maybe i'll just export some things for photoshop and then i can start painting on top of that and that's becoming dark very quickly that's kind of frightening why is it becoming so dark what a mood kill

Channel: Critical Giants

Views: 47,316

Rating: 4.985878 out of 5

Keywords: tutorial, blender, howto, concept, art, critical, eevee, cycles, learn, design, 3d, visdev, modelling, tree, trees, nature, shading, materials, beginner, easy, 10 minutes, fast, artistic, procedural, sculpting

Id: MDXB3SDQHYw

Length: 8min 48sec (528 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021