How to Generate a Tree with a Looping Wind Animation in Blender

welcome to this new video today i want to demonstrate the free and pre-installed tree generator add-on for blender and show you how to create this looping wind animation before we can start we have to enable the add-on open the user preferences go to the add-on tab and search for sapling 3gen when found make sure to tick this little checkbox to activate it also enable the node wrangler if you haven't already since we need it later on for the shading process to add a tree press shift a and select the sapling tree under curve in the bottom left corner you should now find this menu where you can customize the tree the tree generator already comes with a few great presets that you can choose from for this video i'm going to use the small maple for the geometry i leave all the settings on the default but i want to increase the branching levels to 3. sometimes when using this add-on the tree becomes completely black don't worry about that too much it usually goes back to normal shading after changing any other setting next i enable the leaves and change their shape to rectangular to be able to add a wind animation we first have to turn on the armature and then switch to the animation tab make sure that your tree is finalized since after animating you won't be able to make any changes since the animation is pretty hard on the computer i enable fast preview to hide the tree object then i check armature animation and press play to preview a really cool feature of this add-on is the ability to loop the animation i set this to 100 which means that it will repeat the same motion every 100 frames i disable fast preview and my tree is finished the next step is to add a shader to see the materials switch to render preview mode and disable scene world i want to start off with the bark shader so i hide the leaves for now then i open the shader editor and add a new material to get the bark structure i start off with a noise texture also add a texture coordinates node and use the object output to increase the contrast i add a color ramp node and move the stops in a bit the first thing you might notice is that this pattern is constantly repeating this is very easy to fix by changing the noise from 3d to 4d to actually make it look like bark i want to stretch the texture along the trunk to do so simply mix the object coordinates with the normal output then i increase the scale of the noise to about 40 and adjust the colors to make it look more like a tree a very important step for the spark material is to add bump plug the factor into the height and decrease the strength now we have bump but it looks way too shiny to fix this add a map range node and use the same texture again for the roughness adjust the from min and from max values to increase the contrast and set the 2 min and 2 max to rather high values to make the surface less reflective this material already looks pretty good but i want to add a bit more variation with another noise texture i set this one to a low scale and use a color ramp to adjust the contrast i'm also going to slightly increase the distortion then i add a mix rgb note and use this noise for the factor i want the mix color to be a dark green i'm happy with the result of the spark shader here is the complete node setup for the leaves i would usually go outside and create my own image textures of them but since it is impossible to find any leaves under the current circumstances i decided to do it the lazy way and download this texture from cgbookcase.com i used the base color normal opacity and roughness maps from both the front and the back for my purpose the 1k version was sufficient if you intend to get close up shots of the leaves you could go with the 2k resolution unhide the leaves and create a new material since we have the node wrangler add-on enabled we can just select the principles bsdf shader and use the shortcut ctrl shift t to quickly create a pbr setup select the base color normal and roughness maps and press import now the image texture is mapped onto the planes but the borders are not correct to fix this duplicate one of the image textures and make sure to press this button next to the name with a 2 on it to make it a single user then load in the opacity mask and plug it into the alpha input if you look closely you can see that the leaves are cropped on the side this is because the uv map is too small enter the uv editing workspace and scale everything up until it fits now the sides are correct but we get this extra piece in the front to get rid of it go through all the image textures and change them from repeat to clip the leaves are a bit too small for my taste to increase their size enter edit mode change the period point to individual origins and press s to scale them up the front of the leaves already look good but i want the back side of them to have another shader for this i duplicate the principled bsdf node and mix them together for the factor i use the geometry node with the back facing output this adds the first input to the top part of the faces and the second input to the bottom part for this shader we can again use the shortcut ctrl shift t to add the image textures then make the same adjustments we made before the material now looks really good but i want to add a bit of color variation to the individual leaves for this i am going to use the random per island output of the geometry node this gives us a random value for each individual plane we are going to use this to drive the hue and saturation of the base color if i directly plug this into the hue the effect is way too strong this is why i add in a map range node and limit the values between 0.46 and 0.54 then i do the same with the saturation but this time i want the values to be between 0.9 and 1.1 the only thing left to do now is to duplicate this setup and also add it to the bottom part of the leaves this is the final note setup for the leaves and here is the finished tree with the wind animation if you get those black artifacts between the leaves when rendering simply increase the number of maximum bounces for the transparency if you want to render it in eevee you have to go into the material settings of the leaves and change the blend mode to alpha clip also remove the random color part we created since the random per island output is not supported with ev that's it for this tutorial i hope it was interesting and i could teach you something new feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback on this video i'm nick from render daily see you in the next one

Channel: Nik Kottmann

Views: 61,251

Keywords: Blender daily, blender, blender 3d, tutorial, blender.daily, tips, 3d, how to, How to Generate a Tree and Create a Looping Wind Animation in Blender, sapling tree gen, tree generator, tree add-on, free tree add-on, create tree blender, easy, simple, blender tree add-on, blender tree, tree animation, wind animation, looping, looping animation, looping tree animation, tree model, model tree, how to create tree blender, generator, maple, leaves shader, bark shader, tree material, tree, bd

Id: GMhPSfhd9AI

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021