Maya: Paintfx Tree Walkthrough

all right so for this tutorial it's going to be a little bit more of a walkthrough and a less of a tutorial so then walk through the paint effects tool which is something that I haven't seen too many recent tutorials on so much so I thought maybe we could revisit it now because there's a really useful tool so I use this quite a bit when I need trees in the background or or even some foregrounded trees and foliage plants things like that although it's really useful there's a lot to it so let's just take a look at some of the settings and figure out what we can do to make to make a tree and I'm not going to really have any plink of reference here we're just going to go for it and walk through the tools and see which ones are useful all right so to create something in paint effects we go to modeling menu and generate and what we're going to do instead of starting from scratch is we're just going to grab a brush and this opens up our selection visor and in here are all of the paint effects brushes and if you choose to kind of go through you can find that there's just a wide range of stuff that paint effects is able to generate but we're going to just kind of come to concentrate down here in the tree mesh and we're going to pick one of these to take a look at and maybe customize a little bit and I think we're just going to start with this one here now I will say that there are a couple of these which are a little the reason for these little clocks here is is the density of polygons that you can expect from from this particular preset this is a heavy dense model now here's a lightweight model and what's interesting to remember about this one and I believe this one is that they're based on cards so you do have to be a little bit selective about where you're starting but you got a basic route out here so you have you know oak and birch and maples and pine trees so you have an idea where you can begin so we're going to start with this oak just to take a look at what we can do so what I'm going to do is double click this and that loads that tool into our paint effects brush which is over here now when you're in here when you're in the viewport you'll have the brush looks like this and I believe it should hold down B you can scale the brush up and down just as you would with soft selection or RS and brushes but it's kind of hard to judge what you're going to get and so what we're going to do is just for the trees when we drag it's going to grow the tree a single tree on a stroke and I'll let go so what we end up with here with is our paint effects tree and a stroke down here which is basically a NURBS curve all right so now what we want to do is let's take a look at some of the settings we have to modify what this is giving us and you know you might say to yourself that this is not the best looking tree in the world and maybe you're right but if we get sine of a way I can guarantee it doesn't really matter so much so that's why this tool is useful inside of Maya alright so let's take a quick look there's a lot of stuff let's open up the attribute editor there's a lot of stuff that we can actually ignore during this setup because what we have to remember is the lineage of paint effects paint effects came into my a long time ago and that was when the Maya software engine was the primary engine inside of Maya and paint effects came onto the scene as a post render effect that got applied on top of the rendering that you've already done as a had its own master izing engine that being said there's a lot of the settings that refer back to that that we can kind of ignore now so here's let's take a look at what we can do so when you first open up the attribute editor you'll get the stroke attributes now the stroke attributes include a bunch of really useful things that maybe I'll go over in a different tutorial but the one that we should be really sort of interested in here is the seed now display quality it just as a mention you know really just reduces what what the polygon counts going to be but we certainly don't want to deal with that we can handle the polygons first of all and the second of all we don't get a good representation when we're working with it speed is a randomization seed for all of the random randomizing activities that happen within the stroke itself and you can see as we move the seed we get a completely different treat now what's important here is that once we set our rule set for our tree we basically can apply a new seed to that tree and get something entirely new but based on the same set of rules and that's going to be sort of critical to sort what we're going to talk about towards the end of this walkthrough all right so moving forward let's not worry about the rest of this right now let's head over to the brush menu here which is the Union does the oak white leafy medium to medicube so right off the top you can see that there's different types of brushes some of these basically most of these don't matter so much anymore if you're not using it as a post render effect we're only going to be worrying about the mesh now the global scale is something that you can each sort of easily adjust how big it is in your scene all of these brushes come in at different sizes looking at channels this isn't a big deal this again refers back to our the original rasterizer used for this the brush profile is not something that matters so much for this we have brush wits with which we adjusted at the beginning but these are for more distributed brushes such as grasses and other foliage things like that again it doesn't matter for this particular brush twist is something that doesn't really isn't going to affect our work so much thin line and multi streaks is specifically for paint effects hair which is really useful and then we'll get into the stuff that starts to matter that's mesh and one of the first things we can do is our tube sections and you'll notice that as I reduce this you can see the vents the divisions around the axis as the tubes that are being created so if you need a higher resolution tree you can certainly bump this up let's just keep this low for now low ish and 12 where it was and then sub segments are are for rendering I believe sub division before get your master eyes all right so we're not have to worry about this so much n Katz's sometimes what you you might have to worry about that depending on what your stroke looks like here we can see that if I switch this on we get caps on the bottom of all of our tubes i but let's just keep moving on we have fillings on the mesh you can add signs and you know for flowers roses things like that and then here anytime that we some see something that refers back to shading is just something that we can ignore because it just will apply based on how we're going to use this so we have a whole shading menu we want to worry about we have a whole texturing menu something we can ignore illumination we can ignore once again like the rasterizer would fake shadows and things like that shadow effects certainly ignoring glow and finally we get to tubes now tubes is where we can start really manipulating our stroke so we have our tree here and we look at our creation set this is going to refer to any of these tubes that are happening in the creation so branches and what we can call a trunk here are just a subset of branches we're not going to worry about this the once again tubes per step refers to you know grasses and flowers and bushes things when you make one long stroke you want a whole bunch of them to pop up along you tube randomization of course is something we want to kind of keep up there start tubes as one that's this beginning and then segments is 15 so this is where you can add additional divisions along the tube and sometimes increasing this does help with some things but also as you increase it it does become a little bit more out of control so we're going to keep this a little bit lower just for the sake of playing this so nice minimum and maximum is nice thing to deal with because sometimes your your twos can end up very evenly circular and while that is the case with many trees adjusting this gives you a little bit more a little bit more variation and we'll see how we can kind of deal with this a little better so let's get something like this okay so it's a little more crazy in there just a little bit nutty okay so as you can see small adjustments can start to affect things very quickly so your tube width is sort of based on the base of your tube and the tube with to is the end of your tubes and that's all of these your width randomization is something you can usually kind of deal with understand and as we move down through here we have things like which scale now this graph refers to what happens along the length of this tube and you can see like if I need this roots to be a little bit more prominent I can pull my trunk in a little bit tighter and then make these root base a little bit more prominent and that's how that works alright so moving on to growth oh sorry elevation min and Max is just how much your tree is going to lean or your plant is going to lean and as much min and Max is kind of rotating or leaning in the other direction all right so that's enough of that growth is where much of this all happens right so we have some major settings here that we can adjust and and all of these are fairly important but the one we want to start with is probably turning off our leaves and kind of dealing with the structure of the tree itself so when we turn off our leaves we can see our branches and twigs and twigs are things that come off of our main trunk and branches are like that they're like a subset of each other like one has to be there for the other so even if you remove the branches you left with these twigs and then the branches come off of those twigs all right so moving two branches what we're going to see that simple settings from one are going to be reflected in the others so that as we sort of figure out what we need to be it kind of makes sense so moving in and to get a little closer view you can see that our branches how they kind of generally work and as we can just drop this down one thing you want to be really careful of with these number settings and split settings and things like that is you have to be very careful about ratcheting these up too high too quickly so make really small moves on these as you can see like moving to three branches generates a really dense tree and one thing we'd have to be really careful of this with we had leaves turned on at this moment you can really kind of bring your whole computer to a screaming halt so that's why we want to turn off the leaves to sort of adjust or one one thing that you can do is here you can see the branch split depth kind of defines how many times and where at splitting is going to occur so you can sort of define how dense your tree is going to look I adjusting as how many times these branches are going to split right so it might be that you have a low split depth and you provide more branches on those splits and vice versa so depending on the type of tree that you're looking to create also really important setting here is branch dropout when we raise this up we get branches that are basically trimmed and this allows us to give a much more varying appearance to our tree right so we're getting in a better spot now and these split randomizations allow us to continue to add variation to that and split angle is something that allows us to go from a tree that's a little bit more upright and pruned to sort of a maybe a bush that's been splits so this just adjust the angle between the two branches when they do split and finally a split twist legs ease around now if this is you know 0 they all sort of happened on the same angles right so what we do want is we want to have whoops we want to have a twist that imparts variety into our tree and it's pretty easy to get there all right so finally we have some other options there's of course middle branch which put some things in between the splits and split biasing but basically those are kind of what you need and then after you kind of get a hold of how that works you'll see that the twigs are going to be very similar here so we can have a number of twig clusters which how many twigs are come out of this tree so of course we raise the supplicants what bends we lower it gets smaller and you can see how they sort of come down tree here right and and you'll notice is that they is that there's a clear spiral pattern to this and that's can we defined in our twist as well so we can see how to solve that but we if you're noticing that right now then we can fix that so we also have lengths how long are they going to be how far-reaching is this tree drop out again in an important setting and and then you have base width and tip widths and this just allows you to make you know heavy trees or slightly like branches coming out and then the start value here allows you to raise it up the tree so trees that have tall trunks that have been pruned and maybe in neighborhoods you know they tend to have tall trunks and then of course trees some trees have very low starting branches and so we can kind of bring this up and then we have this twist we have this twig angle which allows them to droop and one of the nice things here is I will actually go against the floor do this and then also a second angle for upper branches so you know this allows you to sort of to find strength of trees and things like that alright so let me give a little and finally this is the twig twist this is where we get to impart more angle between when one is going to go one and next one so obviously if we if we move this to one you can see that basically that means 180 degrees for each one so we get tree branches on the other side which is useful if you need to make like an apple orchard or or grapes vineyard for grapes on the vineyard so by picking sort of a number that's going to be a little bit less repeating we're going to have a better result here as it looks a little bit more random a twig stiffness allows you to not have that bend and in fact branching after twigs gives you some really interesting effects as well so you can get really varied and interesting trees by just making a few of these adjustments finally your trig link your twig length scale is something that allows you to based on the position up of the main branch you can sort of adjust the wit can reach of the plumage of the tree so I know some trees my neighborhood grow a little bit like this where they have kind of a narrow start and then get wide at the top and then of course you have some that could get much more bulbous like this I kind of grow out so you can kind of adjust that very easily all right so now we've got a tree in place made some major adjustments to that and I'm going to go back and turn on the leads and so the leads here are interesting this particular default really means you to go in and make some adjustments to this because it's very regular so just like the branches the leaves in the cluster if you pop this up again you have to be really careful they will duplicate very quickly and they'll just go in pairs now once again you know for certain pine trees and things like that you want multiple leads on a cluster and then number of leaf clusters really just determine how many leaves are going to show up between the beginning and the beginning value and the end of the tip here right so we can adjust the least count right so some obviously some trees are very leafy leaf top out is another one I think is really important these drop out values really allow you to get that randomization that you want in foliage so you can set whether you know where your leaves are going to occur and your leaf length is how long your leaf is and you have like a base width and a chip width as well okay you stick with it depends on something here so you know some pretty large leaves in this case that is probably way too big for this tree although some trees two hands in it alright so we get this setting that we have sort of number of leaves now it's kind of odd that some of these are split out to where they are least start you would think would be up here in Leeds this is where in the branch they begin so some trees tend to be very Airy in the center and some very dense in the center so so between these two settings you can kind of decide what kind of tree you're going to be dealing with there so you have these leaf angles these angles are sort of the angles around the branch and then how they interact with the branch looks like my should be all right now one thing that I do fine all right useful now they used to have this used to be a setting like this is just make sure that they always face the camera which is nice I guess in some forest settings but one thing that I think is more useful is facing the Sun now as we adjust this what they'll try to do is they'll bias themselves to face a Sun and this is generally sort of how you find these a little bit more it's not that they're completely random so you can find a spot in here and your Sun Direction is defined again up here in the growth so if we wanted it coming from X Y just kind of put same values in there so it's coming from that angle generally you know so like this and maybe that's sort of your southern angle and your leaves to be sort of adjusted to face that southern facing angle now we can add a lot more detail to these needs by adding segments to them and that will split the leaf and from that stage you can add twist and twirl that's actually toiling around but there are let's see here your least curl allows you to bend the leaf a little bit right and I find that these a little bit of sub settings do quite a bit to help your shading just adding just a touch of curl to these leaves and you probably don't need as many segments but there we go and flatness is something that allows you to adjust leaves into tubes which will be useful for different varieties of plants we can make this flat leaves and we can decay the size as it gets to the end of the branch or we can actually increase the size which may indicate that we actually get more Sun on the outside of the tree and and we can actually randomize the sizes quite a bit all right so once we have gotten here and obviously this is a weird tree but you can understand how you can sort of go in this direction to find something at this stage now we're kind of we can be kind of done with this the rest of this here which allows it to droop a little bit but the rest of this as you can see is related to shading we can ignore that again we have settings for flowers and buds but that's that's for your own experimentation now the last step we would make really is is down here in behavior and behavior has a couple of options for us one being that we can use displacement and that might be just adding some noise to it which can be pretty aggressive wiggle you know whatever you need to do just to add a little bit of interest but really down here and we have some interesting stuff in forces now in forces here's our path if we rise this you'll see that it will head to our path and we can use this for a variety of reasons you know maybe things got blown and some wind or some forces we can have to get attracted to that path which is different right it gets sucked down which can be an interesting effect depending on what you need to do of course it goes the other way we can have it follow the curve this probably needs to that curve if we have many plants on this that would be then we don't have a surface that we painted on so we don't need then randomization is just adding more many more anything through there gravity pulls the whole thing down right which we can get some interesting effects there so you can kind of dial that end to where you want it to be and we have some of the deflection items but also here in turbulence finally is different varieties of turbulence that happen over time so in this case we can choose tree wind and what happens is when you scrub through time we get this displacement through a tree way so you know once again turning down the turbulence maybe turning up the frequency and adjusting turbulence speed it gives us a different variety of effects so we have this blowing tree now so what can we do with this essentially now let's say we are happy with our tree and this is a good thing if we look at our outliner you can see that this exists as stroke and a curve the stroke exists on this curve so what we can do now is we can select our tree and we can say for other rendering engines such as VA and mentor a render man etc we need this to be in polygons so we're going to those who are modifying convert paint effects to polygons and if you check the option box here you have a couple options you have vertex color mode we don't want that we want quad output we can hide the stroke that's fine and poly limit so here it's set to zero which means it's unlimited otherwise you can choose however many polygons do you want so I'm going to go ahead and convert this and I got closest right so now I've got here this is our oak tree right as polygons or whatever tree we wish to be having here so now what we can do let's say you know if you wanted to have this animation you could certainly just cache this out that's a proxy for whatever rendering engine you're using view a mental and Amanda there but if you just need a still tree we can do this as well what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this group and I'm just going to duplicate it and I'm going to language my lost my widget there interesting all right so we're going to do is just move this off to one side down the x-axis Thanks so now I've got a tree it is a duplicate of the tree that I just made and it's got no history so the animation doesn't exist on it anymore and one thing you want to note is that this is a mesh and if we look at our UV editor it splits the mesh into two meshes one which is a leaf mesh and one which is a branch mesh and the branch mesh you can see extends in the cluster the UVs and every branch exists on the same mesh as does the leaves leaves exist all on this one in the same UV space so if you want to guess that there are scripts out there which will take these UVs and randomized into four six locations or so so you can have multiple leads on your tree but for this case we're just going to keep it just Texas so this is our this is our tree as such and now we can go back to our stroke right and we can go to our feed value again and we can make this adjustment now that we have a tree that exists based on a set of rules we can go and find a feed that provides something I mean I may be pretty different something is just a little bit of variety in here big split in the middle will be interesting right and we can take that tree and we can duplicate that candy and of course can't remove it there okay Winx area and I can move this one here alright so here now we have two trees right now we can go back again and I can say our stroke here one more time I'm going to adjust this feed to find something a little bit different there and I will once again select this group duplicate it and move it out here right so essentially what I've done is once you kind of Center up on one type of foliage you can create a set of right you know a variety off of that and and this is important so I'm going to hide my animated tree and my original paint effects trees I have these three trees you know I can do this with a whole variety of different plants and create a library of a set of a few of these so I'm going to go through and I'm going to take these leaves and I have a material made well let me just show this real quick what happens here is it makes a set of pretty bad materials to put on your tree as placeholders so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to apply I grab the used leaves and we go ahead and apply a existing material to neesh and I have one care for the buck as well just a material tree bark alright so now that I have these with materials I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to Center these trees all right and now what I can do is I can instance these across scene right so in my outliner here I'm going to go ahead and group these and call them trees and open this up and what I've done is I've already set this up if you're curious I have an instancing tutorial also on my my channel list here so if I unhide my ground plane when I've gone on my ground plane is a particle generator which generates particles on the plane here just like this you will like top you can see and I'm going to select my trees and my particles and I'm going to go up to my text menu and choose unparticles instance err I'm going to go ahead and choose this option box and what I've done here is move that I'm going to make sure that I'm going to make a change here which is a level of detail I'm going to switch to bounding box and what that will do is create bounding boxes for the instances instead of a full geometry I've gone ahead and I've set up indexing as well as well as rotation which gives it an invitation around the y-axis and I'm also set up a randomizing scale I'm going to the planet oops I chose the wrong thing under my instances so I'm going to go ahead and adjust that to bounding boxes there we go and that shows me all where my trees are going to go and I can go ahead and hide my original ones and so at this stage and just so you can see it I added these particle attributes here and here is my script for that just a simple uniform scale across the way a little bit of randomization on all axes and fully around on the y and my instancing chooses between zero and two so far I only have three trees here so here are my trees being instanced and I can go ahead and just let this run and you see if I can generate quite a few trees very easily without too much slowdown I am recording so there's that slow down and with the leaves and the cue bike shader on there [Music] I can go ahead and render this out and so this will send this over to random in let me bring up it and here is our trees so that's three trees instance I don't think I have too many instances here look like it yeah four thousand instances which is not too much but you can kind of see pretty quickly that that it can be very effective at good distances so that is basically how to go ahead and work through the paint effects settings to adjust and make a tree with a little bit of experimentation you can really find easy ways to make all kinds of foliage and plant life and you can really quickly populate a scene using instancing that's pretty lightweight when it comes to rendering so there you go I hope that was useful and I hope there was a useful more recent walk through some of the paint effects settings and good luck using it and it's on this

Channel: jfernsler

Views: 37,242

Rating: 4.965035 out of 5

Keywords: rendering, renderman, beginner, paintfx, tutorial, instancing, tree, plant, animation, maya, 3d

Id: 9R0ZFKnkaaU

Length: 34min 35sec (2075 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2017