Model A Low Poly Tree In Maya | A Simple Tree

all right welcome back everyone today we're going to model a simple tree let's take a look so these are the low poly trees we'll be making today they're pretty simple but quite fun looking we're covering how to make the tree trunk the foliage how to make it kind of interesting as well as using maya's deformer tools to help reshape our tree let's jump in okay so let's begin go up to your poly modeling shelf and add a cylinder into the scene we're going to use this to make the tree trunk press t on the keyboard to bring up this cylinder window and i'm going to change the subdivision axis to 6. that'll give me a nice low poly look and what i want to do next is i'm going to press w to bring up my move tool i want to bring the pivot to the bottom of my um cylinder so i'm going to hold down d then v drag this arrow down let go then hold down x and bring this back up so i'm dragging that arrow up and now it's sitting on the origin perfect and now let's extrude those top faces um to have our tree grow up so go into face mode so i'm going to hold down the right mouse button this is how i prefer to get into my marking menu i'm going to go into the face component mode i'm going to box select everything here so the side and the top then what i'm going to do is hold down shift do another box select and this will unselect those side faces and now i just have these top faces all right that's one way to select them and what i'm going to do next is extrude up so i'm holding down the shift key and i'm going to extrude up but before that i want to give it a bit of a taper so i'm just pressing r to go into the scale tool scaling that in just a little bit and then i'm pressing w again to go into my move tool into my moved move tool hold down shift and then extruding up there we go and then i'm just creating some sections here where the tree is growing up it just sounds so funny growing up but the tree is growing upwards and pressing w again to go into move tool holding down shift extruding r to go into scale again right and then w to go into move hold down shift and extrude all right and then the last part i'll just bring it up a little bit higher and i'll scale that in a bit as well right so now we have our tree trunk but it looks more like a street post than a tree trunk so we will need to deform this a little bit so i'm gonna hold down the right mouse button i'm gonna go into object mode select my mesh and then up here on the form tab open that up and we're going to go to um this soft modification tool i'm going to open up this option box just going to reset this and i'm going to turn on preserve history this allows us to save those modification tool handles so click soft modification and now we have this and if you hold down b and the left mouse button and drag you get a bit of a fall off and wherever you click on this it'll add us a modification handle and we'll be able to um modify it so let's do that click anywhere on your mesh adjust your falloff the way you want and you can adjust your mesh right what we want to do is just keep orbiting around our mesh and move some of these handles a little bit if i open up the outliner you can see that it's adding modification handles right so i'll click on another point i can move it right and now it has a more of an organic form it's not so rigid right add as many as you like when you're done um just click cue i'm going to add one more just move this a little bit maybe actually i just want to decrease the fall off a bit on this one and then move it okay i think that's good i'm going to go into object mode sorry i'm going to select my mesh and then what i want to do is um we have the option now to either delete the history to get rid of those soft modification handles or we can select them right and it'll highlight and we can still move them so adjust it some more i'm going to turn on wireframe on shaded right so you can see and sometimes what i like to do is just grab some of these just pull them down a little bit to change the um the angle of that edge loop makes a little bit interesting and another thing you can do if you want to select the modification handles from here it's really hard to just select them but what i do is i box select the mesh and the handle then i unselect the mesh right that gives me the handle and i can adjust it and move it some more if i like all right i think that looks pretty good let's select our mesh and delete that history and now let's create some foliage so it's pretty tempting to do some simple foliage and i'll show you what that looks like we can use this polyplatonic object so the platonic solid open up the attribute editor just gonna move it up scale it up a bit as well and we can go into this polyplatonic one tab and change the subdivision mode to triangles go up to mesh display harden these edges and we pretty much have this low poly look already so this ball and we can scale it and make it a little bit um well maybe not like that but maybe something like this but i'm gonna do it a little bit different so let's move this off to the side for now we'll reuse it later but what i'm going to do is i'm going to add a cube into the scene so clicking this and i'm going to bring this up to here i'm going to scale this up maybe scale it down a bit and what i'm going to do is select this top face pressing w to go into my move tool extruding this up so i'm holding down shift then i'm going to scale this in a little bit just to give a bit of a point and then i'm gonna do the same for the bottom extrude that down and scale that in all right so now we have this kind of shape let's go into object mode select our mesh and what i want to do is smooth this out so give it some subdivision subdivisions so i'm opening up the modeling toolkit we have the smooth button and i'm going to click that once and we get this i'm going to give it a little more a few more subdivisions so i'm going to turn this to 2. that's what i want i'm just going to scale it down a bit as well and maybe bring it up there we go so now we have this a shape now the next thing i want to do is um um displace these vertices so select the mesh i'm going to also maybe for now um delete the history and freeze these transformations and i'm going to go up to here where it says edit mesh there's this transform option open up that option box and by default it's at um the randomness is zero this is sort of like um the intensity at which it'll randomize just gonna move this up to about five or point five i should say and click transform vertex all right now what we wanna do is look for this blue handle just pull this out and you can see that it's displaced those vertices for us so let's take a look go into object mode select our mesh we'll turn off wireframe on shaded and you can see it's already starting to look very um interesting a little bit foliage like right so the next steps that we'll be doing is reducing this into triangles but before that let's select our mesh i'm going to close this window and this part may seem a little bit complex at first but eventually it's second nature right it'll become second nature so first we'll remesh it open up this option box it's just gonna delete this history i keep saying delete history at this part but um reset it and we're going to remesh it there we go then select the mesh again what i want to do next is uh retopologize it some mesh open up the retopology window here and i'm just going to reset this and what i want to do is give it a face count that will capture this form can choose about 3 000. one thousand probably worked i'm just gonna be safe choose three thousand and click retopologize okay now it has an edge flow that better matches this form so now what we wanna do is triangulate harden these edges and then reduce so let's do that select the mesh delete the history we're going to go to mesh triangulate then mesh display harden edge would delete the history one more time and go mesh reduce and now what i like to do is just drag the slider all the way to 100 and then slowly drag back i'm going to hold down control and drag back until i get a look that i like it's just a bit faster let's take a look i think that looks pretty interesting maybe i'll reduce the geometry just a bit more and there we go so let's take a look looks pretty good i'm not crazy about this point here it's not too bad i'm just gonna move it just upwards a little bit there we go uh maybe in a little bit as well and now we have a nice looking low poly tree we can just adjust the size of this if we want so something that matches the branch here a little more and i think that looks pretty good um and then let's just duplicate this tree trunk so i'm just going to ctrl d to duplicate move it aside and see what we can do with this right so using that displaced vertex we can make this look pretty interesting as well so i'm going to select this move it over here move it up a little bit and scale it up and i'm also going to delete that history freeze those transformations and now let's select this go up to edit mesh and go transform um you can choose the strength that you like just to keep it where it was at and click this then i'm going to look for this blue arrow and just pull this out and with this one here i find um being a bit daring creates a quite an interesting shape so i'm going to pull out by quite a bit to something maybe like this or even a bit more and then what i want to do is go back into object mode select this and scale it back down now let's take a look and i think that looks pretty good i i think for this one i'll even give it a bit of a rotation right just to change the that a bit there we go i think that looks pretty good let's take a look i have a couple of materials i made from earlier let's assign it to this so make a material if you like but for this i'm just going to just give this foliage one this one i'll give foliage too these are just lambert's by the way nothing special and these ones i'll just give my tree trunk all right so you can see in not much time at all we have um just gonna move these over a bit i guess i can just turn off the grid for now um we have some low poly trees that look pretty good in my opinion and should uh fit well in some of your projects and games all right i hope you enjoyed today's tutorial on making simple low poly trees for your game i do want to cover other types of trees as well and they'll be going over different techniques so by the end of it you'll be able to make a variety of trees so look for those videos this has been digital dream box your destination for game art [Music] you

Channel: Digital Dreambox

Views: 8,097

Keywords: Model low poly trees in Maya, Create a low poly tree in Maya, Create low poly trees in Blender, Model a low poly tree in Blender, low poly art, low poly modeling, Low poly Blender, Maya, Blender, How to low poly Maya, how to create low poly art, low poly modeling tutorials, low poly art tutorials, low poly tree, low poly art style, how to make low poly art, Maya for beginners, low poly Maya, how to make a low poly tree, digital dreambox, dreambox, Maya tree tutorial

Id: 5u7nPb-0wl4

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021