build funky trees in Blender!

hey hello trees are hard to scan hard to sculpt and hard to procedurally generate one could almost think that trees and cgi don't go well together blend has this pretty cool sapling add-on that enables you to get a tree like this which is pretty detailed and it's a darn good tree it has some problems though like these weird parts that tend to stick out and are not really connected we can essentially see that those are just individual tubes stuck together and also we are lacking roots so our trees always sticks out of the ground i try to make a more interesting looking tree kind of procedural you have to do a little bit of modeling though but check it out as you can see it has a little bit more character we do have roots it is one cohesive model and we have a lot of wicked little witch-like tree branches and it's quite tweakable less than the sapling add-on of course but i'ma show you how to create this anyways just like life itself all begins with a single vertex i'm getting myself a cube in edit mode hit m collapse and you get a single vertex at the origin of the world i'm going to go into side view and i will move it over just a tad and i'll create this kind of cross section that you could imagine a tree has ctrl r some loop cuts into the situation so you have an even distribution of vertices throughout the line it just looks better i know you've already guessed that we're using a skin modifier of course now this thickness is alright for me however if you tap into edit mode select all those vertices and hit ctrl a and slide your mouse you control the thickness of your skin let me get rid of these sun lights so we can see the empty that i'm adding and now we can use an array modifier and select this empty as the object offset and if i rotate it around we get a second part of the tree now get yourself like three or four or five different parts of the tree and go into top view and rotate your empty so they are about evenly distributed peel your eyes for the simple deform modifier and select twist if you twist it around the z-axis you get this characteristic tree twisting action which is a tank twister ironically i really dislike how my branches are twisting so i'm just taking my simple deform moving it up before the skin modifier so the geometry doesn't distort but i still dislike this propeller tree swastika that we've created so perhaps we should create a vertex group go into edit mode select everything that is your tree branches and put it into a group and now you can put it here under restrictions and swap it around so everything but those branches is twisting now what's going on here since our branches are staying stationary now we get this tangled mess so perhaps just create another empty move it up where the twisted piece is and select this as the origin now by moving it up and down you can decide where the twist has its origin and up here it should remove our buggy mess let's add another simple deform and set it to bend that seems to be a good trick if you put this bend modifier before the array you can even kind of influence the weird shape of this tree and maybe experiment around with that a little bit it yields fun results now next up is the displacement modifier and we're going to use it to randomly shift our vertices up and down so we get more random tree shapes hit new and instead of image or movie select the clouds texture scale it up as much as you can if i put this displacement modifier before the array it will displace each branch the same so i want to put it after the array however i don't want my displacement to affect the skin so i'm going to slide down the skin after the displacement now playing around with the strength and the settings of this texture warps and wobbles my tree around so it looks as unique and individual as you now i want to add a subdivision surface modifier which you can do just by hitting ctrl 1 or maybe ctrl 2 if you want two levels of subdivision now comes the modeling that we actually have to do by hand if i tap into edit mode it's pretty hard to do anything so select those four dots and disable the array modifier disable the d4 modifier this one as well and now go into via frame mode enable proportional editing with o i feel like putting it into sharp mode works best for me select the tip of your branch and make it slim same for the roots i want my stem to be a little thicker though so i'm going to scale this one up those three branches though don't tend to be sausages like this i'll try to make them a little bit more even throughout now i want to create some branches so i'm just extruding out different parts here move your camera around a little bit so they extrude in all kinds of weird and fun angles if you want to be crazy you can even download a picture of a real branch and use this as a reference i think i want to have another big branch that's coming out of the side here and i'm going to make it thinner another branch here perhaps now let's take a look at those roots i'mma make them go like a little spider web like this perhaps don't plan too much ahead be as random as you can and now let's tap out and yield our results this is all right i feel we could twist it a little bit more and if your displacement gets too weird like this maybe try locking it just along the z axis and i also over did it minus three perhaps a little bit much let's just go to minus one or something now in the skin modifier i'm going to select smooth shading so we get a smooth tree and now i urge you to save because we are going to use a remesh modifier which can sometimes be a little bit unstable set it to voxel that works best for me and decrease the voxer size to something like 0.05 meters and don't forget to put this tick to smooth shading again the remasher will close all those nasty gaps here and give you a very cool tree model however you get all those disconnected parts so maybe you will have to play around with the voxel size and the thickness of your branches to get the best result the look of your tree really depends on what you've modeled here if you do something crazy and crooked you will get a crazy and crooked tree if you want something more simple you can do that as well and change the strength of the displacement to get it more or less uniform remember the trick with a simple deform let's try this i'm going to bend it and put it before the array modifier and i can use that to split the top which is fun oh no these roots are pretty broken and scattered so i'm going into edit mode and just increasing the radius a little bit it seems like i'm missing an entire section of the tree here so maybe we can get it back by twisting our array empty a little bit there it is you have so many cool modifiers available so i encourage you try them out and if you find something cool to play around with let me know get yourself a bark material there's one included in this project and you're almost done this is the model from the tree i showed at the beginning it's a lot more complex so it looks better spend a good portion of your time on this modeling part and you know if you don't want to have any problems with the voxelization or if you don't want it to be that high poly you can actually just get rid of this that mainly matters if you get close to your model so

Channel: Kammerbild

Views: 32,482

Keywords: Blender, Tutorial, cgi, 3d, b3d, tree, procedural, sapling, kammertone, kammerbild

Id: 8zfoK2qwYV8

Length: 7min 9sec (429 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021