Make Low Poly Trees & Save the Planet | #Teamtrees | Blender 2.8

hello and welcome to gaba media I'm grant Abbott and today I'm going to be making some trees I saw CG geeks video about making a 20 million tree forest in blender and thought it looked absolutely amazing so do check that out and I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and join in and try and help promotes team trees org it's a great idea where they're trying to plant 20 million trees around the globe by generally the first 20 20 if you're based in the UK then you might want to do something closer to home there are trees for life focuses on Scotland the National Forest Association has a plant a tree campaign and team trees org is teaming up with the Arbor Day Foundation if you want to learn more about that for more information do follow the links in the description so I thought a simple thing that I could do was to show you how to make three low poly trees as quickly as possible so once you've completed your trees go onto social media hashtag team trees and see if we can raise the profile and if you're able you can donate so here's the trees we're going to be making today and I'll try and show you some different techniques for making them as quickly as possible now I've shown this technique before it's using the skin modifier to create the base of our tree and it's nice and quick so into edit mode with vertex mode selected you can go up here to change that or just press 1 on your keyboard select all your vertices with a alt m to merge and then merge them at the center so we've got one point in the center we can now press e to extrude and pull that out and create a tree like thing extrude and pulling them out I might want to move them and vary them seeking box select a few at a time move them across rotate them as you see fit so there's a nice simple tree the next thing to do is add our skin modifier so let's go across the modifiers with the spanner here or the wrench of your American add modifier under the generate menu we've got skin now all looks a bit lumpy and blobby at the moment if you press alt Zed you can go to x-ray mode let's select the whole top here and ctrl a ctrl a to scale and then just move your mouse from side to side and that will scale your branches let's get the very top ones here control a bit top ones here control a and make the bottom ones bigger so in fact let's select both those control a and move them bigger now I might think I want another point in the middle of these two so I select them both right click and subdivide now I've got another point I can think grab that around maybe grab this one into the ground and scale it up with ctrl a and let's grab this pull it around [Music] and there we have a very simple tree base when you're happy with that come out of edit mode and then apply a modifier make sure you are happy with that because that's destructive so we can't get it back and we got a nice tree base to make the tops of our tree we can shift right-click on one of our branches that brings our cursor to that point shift a to add and then add an Ikea now you can change your subdivisions depending on the style you want here I've got a very blocky IQ sphere which I'm going to try this time just for the sake of trying something new and now I can just duplicate that scale it up or eight-eight it a little bit so shift D to duplicate duplicate that scale this one up over here we want the branches to be showing so a little bit of branch is showing is good just make sure you keep rotating them around of course s to scale and G to grab and move them into position make sure you go around to the side as well otherwise you can get a very flat looking tree and there we go there's the first tree let's select that and move it across in the x-axis ship this curse the world origin and start the fresh shift day to add this time I add a cylinder let's bring our cylinder vertices down to six you also probably beyond thirty-two is default zoom in and into edit mode grab the top face so three to go to face mode grab the top face and scale it in that's our trunk back to edit mode let's just duplicate this cylinder so shift thee and bring it up in the z-axis so shifty then Zed and I'm going to scale this but press shift Z so it doesn't scale in the z axis and bring that out and then bring it down on top of my other trunk here's so this is the base of the leaves let's go back into edit mode we've got that top face selected so I can scale that in a bit more it comes in like this and maybe the bottom face out a bit more to scale that out and what I'm going to do with this one is incept this bottom face and then extrude it inwards and I'll explain why I'm doing that in a moment under scaling that one in a bit as well so you get this bottom face we insert it then extrude it inwards now it might be a bit too angular here so I'll go back into edit mode just get that top face and scaling up just a touch there we go okay let's duplicate that shifty duplicate up to there rotate it really slightly and scale it in really slightly shifty move it up rotate somewhere around there go round to the sides as well make sure it's not all uniform and flat and keep scaling it down slightly as you go upwards and just vary it as well and start scaling in the z-axis as well so make them a little bit taller towards the end so ship D grab rotate and scale it down but scale it in the z-axis this time I get to press said twice and then it will scale in the local z-axis so we'll go in the right direction I think that's probably few can just edit your slightly so you're happy with the shape and for the very top one into edit mode and make that top a lot smaller and there we've got a simple tree now what I like to do to this is add a bit of variation so come in and into edit mode with each of these and maybe add a loop cut so ctrl R to add a loop cut down one side and then we can grab this edge here and then just grab it upwards in the z axis and maybe just edit a few of these as well so they've just got a bit of variation it's good let's do the same to another one so grab this one ctrl R to make a loop cut and then G to grab with that edge selected there and maybe pull this edge down here can see the sort of variation that's adding already I'll just quickly do a few more I'm going to come out of x-ray mode so old safe to come out of x-ray mode and just add a few more for variation and I'll talk a bit about why I added that inset in just a moment okay that's looking nice one last thing it's nice to create little notches so with a knife tool press K and just create a cut here with left click going around my tree creating some cuts last one in there back again so I'm just creating this sort of triangle in here which you can see is why we needed that inset when you've hooked it up press Enter and you've got now three faces you can delete so interface mode with three one two three faces delete faces two to go to the edge mode select one of these edges here and press F to fill that face in and F to fill that face in and let me get a notch in our tree let's create a couple of those around things I'll go through the process again here so into edit mode K for knife tool and then just go around your tree might need to get to isolation mode with forth slash on my numpad so I'll just undo that into isolation mode with forward slash on my numpad and let's try and create this notch again now yes this is creating end guns but we don't have to worry too much with stylized low-poly 3 to face mode select those faces and delete them and then select one edge of the base here after fill and after fill that's looking great I think the chunks of it fix with scale but not in the Zed axis so shift said and bring the trunk in a bit you may want to add a bit of variation to your trunk so into edit mode ctrl R and you can do a loop cut around the middle and add a bit of variation to your trunk ok so last one let's grab that move across the X let's move it up into position as well it's s touching the floor we might want to rotate that one in the end as well shift a to add this time I'm going to add a cylinder 6-sided again and we'll make it nice and big nice and tall some around there let's grab that way too tall in fact let's just bring it down to about there scale but not in the Zed so shift said to make it fit into edit mode with tab control R to add a couple of loop cuts one two let's select the top face with 3d and then just select the top face scale that down and now let's move these around to create a bit of variation in our trunk two to go into edge mode alt left click to select a loop cut so alt left click and it's select an entire edge loop scale that down rotate it slightly and grab it and move it across it's got a bit of a squiggle to it let's select the bottom face 3 to face mode and scale that up slightly so we've got a wobbly trunk it is a bit flat this side so ideally you grab an edge loop here and bring it out slightly as well be careful not to make them too flat down here ok so for this one I'm going to press shift right click to move my cursor onto the tree shift K to add mesh plane and I'm just going to scale this in the y-axis so it's like a flat tree branch move it out to the side here into edit mode control our and create two loop cuts select the top edge and scale it up a fair bit and the second one and just scale it up a little bit so it's got a bit like a leaf in a way 3 2 go into face mode grab that middle face and just put it upwards so we've got a very basic branch now it's not really big enough so I'm going to scale that in the X around there your bottom ones you want fairly big so maybe it's just tiny bit bigger and then grabbing the X so it's connected to our tree like this now ideally we want the center point to be here then we can duplicate them and wrap them around our tree so into edit mode into edge mode with to select that beginning edge there and then shift s and I can bring my cursor to the selected so that's a shift s so my cursor is there I can then go into object mode right click and set origin to 3d cursor now my origin is in that position just one last thing I want to do to this into edit mode select one of these edges and just rotate them and I might make it a tiny bit bigger just so it's got a bit of depth to there we go now into top view and this time instead of pressing shift D I'm going to press alt D Sokol T R to rotate and I can rotate it round and then scale it slightly to make it look interesting and maybe rotate it a different way now olt d creates an instance so oakley again rotate around the Zed and move it into position and maybe rotate it this way this time an instance means that if I go into edit mode now it seems to select them all and if I edit one it will edit them all and that's quite handy back into object mode let's select that one again alt D rotate around the z axis and move that into position I can still rotate it in object mode and it will be different to the others and scale it in object mode and it's different to the others so that's still fine to create variation but if I think for a minute that the base is just too big I can go into edit mode select that edge and scale it down and it scales them all and that can be really helpful so with all these selected into front view with one OD to move them upwards are in the z axis to move them around and maybe scale them down just a touch old D and the z axis rotate them around in the said so R then said and scale them down just a touch and just keep doing that all the way up you may also want to rotate it slightly not in the Zed and there we go we've got another good-looking tree now you can go in and rotate some of these around move them into position a bit more just to add a bit of variation I probably should have done these as groups but it doesn't matter too much lastly then is shading so cross the shading tab up here let's add a floor in so shift a mesh plane o G to make sure that's right in the center of our grid scale it right up and we got a floor so let's create a green for our middle tree here new material I'm going to call this green one and give it a nice green not too light say somewhere around here but definitely not too shiny so bring the roughness right up and that's a nice green possibly a bit too dark perhaps I don't like to get too saturated like this but it depends on your style I prefer to go a bit more into the middle so it's much less saturated in the middle here more costly sort of colors so I can select the other green cones on this tree the one I want to copy from last so this one last and press ctrl L to link materials up let's create the brown for the trunk so click on the trunk new material Brown I'll probably only have one brown Brown is down here and you just make it a bit darker I like to go a bit across to the Reds somewhere around there and again take out that roughness now looks nice let's give these trunks that Browns so select both those the one we want to copy from last so it's got a yellow outline ctrl L link materials give one of our trees of green I'll give it a slightly different green this time so new green too this one's gonna have a slightly darker green I think so across the greens some around there and slightly darker might be a bit too dark but let's bring up the roughness to see she asked a touch less and across the yellows a bit more there we go that's fairly nice you could always add a lot of variation in here as well if you liked last one I'll just give it one that I've already got and this one slightly more yellowy and then these three can have this one controlled L materials and these two can have this one control L material there's slightly different greens across your tree as if they're lights hitting them in different directions - I don't like the position of those so I'll give that on that one and this one this one and there we go the last thing you'll probably want to do before rendering is put on your ambient occlusion so into the render tab put your ambient occlusion on and just turn it up slightly so you can see the shadow between the objects without it it's like that and with it it gives that bit of shade and there we go some beautiful low poly trees I hope you enjoyed this do try and get across to have a look at team trees dot org or Arbor Day org or maybe one of the UK ones or ones local to you on social media for everybody to see and get involved thanks for watching and let's see if we can make a difference

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 146,844

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, sculptor, painting, blender (software), blender 3d, blender tutorial, cartoon, gabbitt, style, lowpoly, stylized, quick, low poly tree, low poly blender, blender 2.8, low poly, 3d modeling, how to, tree, trees, plants

Id: p-9pgZI3inI

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Blavaro]

In my experience, Grant is a really great teacher and I would definitely recommend his beginner modeling series too if you're just starting out. He does a really good job at showing proper edge flow and efficiency and stuff

But for just low poly trees, this is fine nothing too crazy going on there in terms of modeling practices

[u/ImaginaryCheetah]

just watch the thing.