Modeling a VFX Silver Birch | Part 1

and here we are are we live yes we are live thanks took a little bit for us to get up and going but we're here finally uh the important thing is that we are here in 2020 the important thing is we're here yeah um okay okay um what i have up is speed tree nine if you guys have hung out with us at siggraph and watched our new video um we have an all new valver coming out very soon and um i am just going to be building the white birch today and we're just going to take this thing from start to finish i'm going to show you some of the new features um this is what i've built up so far without the leaves on it and we're just going to start brand new over here in another window so it's our first live feed we'll see how it goes and i should have introduced ourselves but my name is sarah scruggs and this is danny down below me and uh his last name is actually oaks which is just an added cool feature for being a tree sure i am a living pun this is uh this was my ultimate destiny yeah he's here to answer any of your questions that i can't read because i'm rolling um so the first thing i want to show you in speech nine is we have an all new mode so you're familiar with usb tree and you build everything in generator mode you um can make small adjustments and fine-tune the branches in node mode and we now have freehand mode um i'm just gonna add a trunk in here and show you around a little bit freehand mode lets you do um quick adjustments and everything after you finish made the tree um so you can slide these guys around and build this way it also lets you do paintable displacement so if you want to sculpt the sky you can actually go in here hold the space bar down you'll have a little gizmo that comes up and you can change the size of the sky by dragging and clicking it's very intuitive and then do a very basic sculpt in there you don't have many polygons it's not very pretty um so we will be using these tools today and the second thing we're going to be using is um we have added some things to our photogrammetry tool set go back to generator mode um the first thing we want to do is we are going to bring in a mesh that we're going to be building off we have a scan of a birch and this is going to be a vfx level tree so i'm bringing in this very very high obj it's going to grab that and if you have it named correctly it should bring all your high medium and low end because we are building different resolutions we're going to go ahead and bring in the medium and we're going to go ahead and bring in the low and that should get it started and so with our mesh in we need a material to go with it and so our material bar we're going to go in here and hit add and i have everything organized bark clusters leaves mesh it's going to be in the mesh folder and we're going to bring in the base color and our normal just to get started there got some other maps to load in but we're going to go ahead and assign a mesh cutout that's the thing that we just brought in and now we should be ready to go so just like our regular photogrammetry workflow i think if you've seen the videos on those we're going to be using the templates in the photogrammetry folder here and i'm going to go ahead and put my mesh into the scene i'm going to start it on the origin there because i started it not quite centered and we're going to assign a material to this it's going to be our trunk that we just brought in and it's ginormous because we didn't resize this or anything ahead of time so we're going to go ahead and bring this down to a workable size i'm gonna hit mesh and we're going to go to scale and go ahead and shrink that guy and [Music] that looks okay for a little four string to make a little smaller just because they're not really so chunky um even according to the little man here um that is a little bit more like a white bridge church that you might see in the forest okay we're gonna go ahead and bring in the rest of our maps i'm gonna bring in the ao real fast and we have a gloss map to bring in on this one it's a roughness just depends on how you process the tree so um when you do have the wrap the roughness map in there you actually just hit this little invert check box and these guys are the inverse of each other um this is a pretty dark uh gloss map and one of the first things i do before i get started is go ahead and make sure that this guy is all set up pbr wise the way i would like it now one of the first thing i check is to make sure that this color map is actually within a good range in the render mode we go to excuse me the a better check get the second there there we go and you can see that this map has very very white parts in it and we might be getting a little bit of information lost in there so the first thing i want to do is actually kind of bring this guy down a little bit and get it within the range there pink is fine white is blown out white and so this tree is a very very white bark and it's okay to have a little pink um but that will help color loss up in the top there go back to standard mode and we're gonna play around with the normal a little bit and just make sure this is just nice and sharp i don't want to go too sharp because it's going to start to look like a photoshop outline um when we check our glass we i like to go to the specular and lighting specular and um one of the things about working in here is uh checking this out we want to look at what highlights when this turns so in real life a bark is not all that glossy we don't think of that as a glossy surface um but we wanted this to be able to catch all of the fake light that we're throwing on it and this is just too dark right now and we don't want to do excuse me we don't want to blow anything out to where we lost of information in here i'm just going to raise this up a little bit and i'm going to make this value a little bit higher i'm going to put this on like a 2 4 2.5 and it's a little still not there yet all right now we've got some of this good detail in here and i got a little bit glossier up here and when i move the light around the tree now we're gonna get a really good highlight on one side um in some cases i might go a little brighter than that we're gonna see what that looks like in the regular mode again um and it just helps it pop a little bit makes it a little more 3d okay so that brings us to our very brand new conversion tool and it's going to be in your templates photogrammetry it's going to be the mesh converter we're going to go ahead and add one to the scene and it needs to be connected to your mesh and there's a couple different things that we can do with this um see how it adds down there um this tool lets us grab textures from our mesh so um we're gonna be grabbing two from this one we're gonna grab one from this white area and we're going to grab one from this rough area the mesh converter will also set up a stitch if you want to make an extension from this or it will convert the entire thing into a speak specie branch so let's take a look at what happened here it's got two buttons the top and a bottom you're gonna grab these things just like a gizmo and you can move these around but easier than that you can hold down the t and place on the mesh and it's going to automatically center and align these things so a lot less manual maneuvering like our stitch where you have to get it into place and where it has actually touched the mesh to find it this guy just is fast and simple the bottom i'm going to raise it up just a little bit and this orange area in here is our blend section and if you press on the pink this is going to display the texture that you're about to make and this orange section represents this blend piece up here and this is how we get a tiling texture out of this now on this tree because there's such a difference between the top and the bottom this isn't going to make a good tiling texture because you're going to have this whole thing repeating the whole way through so what we want to do is move the bottom up and see if we can get this in a good place where this texture is good to use didn't do a bad job of picking a place right there oh when you set up this everything up here in the properties is for getting the alignment and the area correct and everything down here has to do with the blend piece so just making sure we're good um pause for a second there there we go i was catching up on the comments for a second there um all right so this is a fairly straight trunk that we're showing you so this aligned very easily um you'll notice that these points along the spine if i had a curvier trunk they might not be very aligned so something like putting extra points in there will help it try to find that out if you have places where these points are overlapping because you're even curvier you can relax them a little bit and it's going to try to straighten them back out it's probably better demoed on a curvier branch but this one's actually fairly easy to set up the more points you add in there the slower it will run so if you don't need them i mean why add them the clearance is going to be how far away this is and you should see that so that would clip my texture and so i've got these little pieces hanging off of the side of the trunk there i want to make sure to include those all right on this branch i'm going to pick a different blend um i kind of want the chunky one because the pieces are so cut out and if you want to view this on its own you can just go to blends only and see what we're actually adjusting there this is going to let you shift the pattern repeat it if it's a very tight pattern i probably don't need all of that and then when you adjust the blend range you need to make sure you have enough on your mesh in order to have this area in here but i can lengthen this or lower it if you go too far you'll notice that the area is cut off square there so you need to make sure you're within the actual range there so this should do a pretty good job we're going to go back to looking at both of them and i might even move it up a little bit let me stretch it out a little bit more see if that works and um just taking a little second to get it exactly where i want it and we're going to go down to the bottom now um you can blow this up if you need to look at it high res so right there might be a little problem area i want to get rid of got kind of a like hard line there i'm just gonna repeat my pattern and see if i can get it in a nicer spot there i might try a couple different pieces so that last one was cutting it out a little too harsh i think this actually works um i'm going to stick with this one i'm going to make my resolution a little higher so i'm going to go to 81.92 just to make a really really big bark because i'm going to be using this one all the way up the tree um it's kind of a short bark so you're going to see some repeats in it pretty fast but we have a solution for that and then when you have everything ready we are going to go export excuse me export the map is going to send it straight to your folder x make new material is going to send it to your folder and it's going to go ahead and load it in for you so we're going to do this one and we're calling this a silver birch there's lots of birches in the world um we are going to go ahead and just say this is bark one oh this will take several seconds just a heads up when you push the magic button the button is magic but you have to be very patient sorry i'm being real quiet over here it's okay how's it going in the comments section i can't see anything going on lately uh it's going good i'm trying to keep up [Music] oh yeah oh do we have any questions so far i guess yeah we've had some questions about ivy uh people want to see uh kind of how to make iv or vines and then there's also some questions about clusters okay um this video is predominantly going to be a vfx video we're doing like some basic photogrammetry to get like a big tree we are gonna have another video on vines we actually overhauled the entire vine system so if you guys remember collections from v8 um they've redone them and you can do a whole lot more with them they're faster and they're easy to work with so we're gonna do a whole video devoted to that um hopefully soon and uh for the cluster lighting and anything games related i'd like to keep that sort of in a games video because that is a whole nother rabbit trail on itself i think that would take me probably a couple hours we are going to take this same burst tree and make a games version of it next um but not in this little session probably but we hope to do more of these yeah anyone in the comments just feel free to let us know what else you'd like to see us do in these videos and we'll try to schedule them out in the future yeah i guess we didn't tell we didn't like completely go over our theme we're winging it here we're not professional streamers this is professional this is as professional as it gets all right so um that instance saved just now i'm gonna just dive back in and you'll see it in your um materials now so that was birch silverberg one that we just created you can see it bring it up now the computer might need a second there you go all right brought it in and that's what our new material looks like and it's got all those kitties in there and we're going to be using this in just a second um so now that we've made a material for the upper part of this tree um one of the things you could do is take this converter and push this convert to chunk and that would make a tiny speed tree branch and that you could keep going you could say convert and place and it would add a stitch right up here i'm gonna show you but we're gonna not build our tree that way so um i'm gonna run this and it's gonna take just a second and i'll show you what it looks like it's a bear with me there this is going to be oh and then we're going to turn around and delete it so i can show you the way that i would actually like to approach this tree so we added lots of options in there and there's lots of different paths for what you can do this is a really great tool this converting place for when you have more of the branch to use as a tie line texture than not so you're gonna have to look at each mesh that you have and decide what route to go um for what you're building basically yeah so many people saying hi i'm impressed there we go all right and this magic tree just has an extension now and this is a special stitch one that you can't make manually we did all the hard work for you and now we have a speed tree on top that you can go ahead and extend and do whatever you want with now because we had such a short area that we made that texture from you can see this repeat happening a lot um so we fix that by going to spine properties and we twist it and that would hide that little flappy thing that's kind of giving us a way there um so it's not bad you can still see it kind of going up there and can do some more work on it um i was going to show you the big stitch but we might as well go ahead and you know it doesn't look that bad i thought we're gonna have too short of a space there to get it going but let's go ahead and keep building on it so um one of the first things i do after i get the trunk in place and happy and ready to go is um we no longer need our mesh converter so that's why it's hidden we want to go get some cool images of the tree that we're about to make so we have a good idea of what we're doing and so i've already pulled those up in a tab for us and one of the first things i do is i find like seven or eight photos that i'm going to be referencing um and what we want to look in these are the shape of the main branches which is what we'll be making next um i like to find black and whites of the winter tree because this helps you figure out how things are put together so looking at this tree i can tell the start angle i can tell that there's some splits going on in here and i can kind of tell the pattern that we need the branches to copy i also like to find a good picture of what we actually want the bark to look like pbr wise and our scans pretty spot on here for being able to use that i found some other pictures in here just for different areas like i like to look at tree in the actual forest area like what that tree would look like on its own how sparse it is that kind of thing um color variations and um i do a lot of far back pictures so i can figure out how the leaves actually cluster so we'll be referencing these to make our generic silver birch i liked this image because you can see that the branches actually change color in the upper canopy so we actually might reuse our darker bark up there um so uh one of the first things to be i'm gonna use an absolute value for this because in the trunk uh when we hit that randomization button um a little bit of variation in here is good but it's good to keep it within the actual species heights um we're gonna make one that's not overly large and just keep it keep it going up there and first thing we want to do is get the shape of this main guy down correctly and um somebody's commenting that it's magic and yes you're right it's very fun um all right so we want to get the shape of this guy right so we're going to go to properties and hit skin and radius and we're gonna use the profile curve to bring down the end of the branch i do want to extend this guy at the end um i'm actually gonna make it a little bit bigger up there and we're going to go ahead and add our second tier branches i like to do the chunk and the next tier branches together before i start adding any noise so i can really get the shape of the tree down before i start messing it up one of the things i want to do is um i've got a lean going on and i don't mind that there's a lean but these trees tend to figure out towards the sky pretty hard and so i'm going to go to spine gravity i'm going to push that back up so it kind of aligns with the back with the sun and we want to go to our templates i'm going to add a simple branch and it's going to add one for me and let's talk generator styles for a second here um i tend to use integral for almost the entire bottom part of the tree it's just easier to control it's mathematically correct and if i can change the height up and down and because i have intervals set it's doing those measurements from the tip of the branch and it's going to be able to fill in and you'll get less wonkiness and monkeyness is a totally acceptable word so how are we doing danny uh we're doing good just just to recap uh a couple of the important vocabulary words that we've heard today ginormous is actually the speech official unit of measurement and wonkiness is a term that we use internally to describe anything that is technically undefinable as nature is in itself undefinable so steve um all right our um our template there just added one branch on so we're gonna generate your styles i'm gonna switch this to interval uh phylite taxi is what we use in the upper part of the tree for getting our leaves and stuff right so interval is my friend we want on this tree let's go back to our reference photo for just a second um we want a pretty shallow start angle and we want a spread branch and we want several main branches but not too too many um this low v thing is something that happens that i kind of like um so these main breeches are going to be kind of sparse i only want like maybe three of them we're going to go ahead and change the start angle first just so i get a feel for that and then go back to interval and i really want uh i'm just going to stick with three i don't really want them to align with one another very well i don't need that many and i kind of want them to be uh stocky i like to keep clamp on parent clamped apparent so it doesn't um if you have this off and you aren't thinking about it you'll get something terrible looking and so claim to parrot is because i don't want to think about it i just want it to be the appropriate amount of thickness these are going to be a little longer because they're their main branches um now we want to start adding in our uh things to really shake up the look of it so i still have too many probably i might push up the first a little bit hey i don't know i like them down there and then we want to make sure that they're kind of rotated around the tree so we get the look of fullness and one of the things i do often is i put some variation in the rotation and i put some variation in the position and that's going to help us look a little bit more organic the um another thing that i do quite often is we never want them to be all the same start angle and so i've got a little bit of variation here i'm going to bump it up just a little bit more and we're also going to do just a little bit of variation in the start rolls just kind of adding a twist um so start angle is this motion going back and forth and start roll is completely new it's changing oh i wish i had like a draw tool okay we'll do it with my arms would you start angle and it's doing like this you probably can see all right we want to go ahead and turn on the extend parent for this guy i'm going to say any and um that is my extension right here before it ended it was chopped off for the whole thing there um that's gonna help us out i'm probably gonna have extend parent on for everything as i built out um stan i think i might just go ahead and kill a couple more branches just because okay so to get the shape of our tree you're going to go to the length and we'll start using our parent curves and curves we want the branches of the bottom to be longer to make a canopy sort of shape so i'm going to go ahead and grab um i'm going to use the person in the paint for this one and we're going to say that according to the branch which is actually our trunk in this case because there's a stitch and a mesh down here i'm gonna make the ones at the bottom of the tree a little longer um i don't need all these points we need to delete them and we're gonna do sort of like a round canopy for this and your basic main branches are very important for the overall shape of the tree basically like if you have a round tree you would want these guys to kind of go out in a round shape they are pretty crucial now i left these kind of short even though the branches itself if you look at the picture um these guys go out all the way but i left them short because i want to add a split at the end of these guys and um since i've got a pretty good start going i'm gonna hit save it's a good a good a good thing to remember every now and again and um i don't know i haven't had some in the comments sorry about that we're gonna go ahead and add our second set of uh branches here i'm just gonna add the same template i did before and um instead of shaping these one is actually probably fine for right now i want to say um put the extension on to any and we're going to go to the branches we just made and i'm going to go to skin um and i'm going to turn on splits and i'm just going to put a ring because i have not wrapped the uv tile enough so you're going to go to uv and um we're gonna change this up here we're gonna say two absolute with one relative and that's gonna give us a nice odd ratio of things that can split or not split and you'll see there's my split right there kind of tiny um so these guys probably get small a little too fast i'm gonna make my split area a little chunkier by going to the radius and grabbing the end of the curve sorry the end of the profile curve and making it a little bigger so that my splits have a little beefiness to them and one of the things that will kill your tree really fast as far as realism is if all these things are the same width around um so i like to go in and add to the radius pretty early on some variation and then make them a little skinnier at the top so this is going to be according to the branch i'm going to make them a little smaller towards the top of the tree now one of the things that is pretty obvious now is that that texture is not going to look too great for us wrapped twice so what we want to do is replace that with another wrapped texture um i have textures you can use a texture from speedtree or make another one from the rest of the sky i'm going to use a longer ratio texture for the wrap texture on the twigs i'm just going to go in the normal bark folder and maybe take one of these guys out of our [Music] it's not as long we're just going to use the generic one that comes with the actual verse tree um and see if that looks since you can get a good blend from it now as two very different colors so we'll have to do some work on this to get it right i'm going to drag and drop that onto the tree and for some reason that didn't work so we'll just go to material and we will grab that same bark and we're going to try to match now so um this is a nice tawny grayed out birch and this guy needs to be toned down and we're gonna add a little bit of yellow into it just to get that up and then we're gonna add just a little bit of red just to get that pink color the same you see the tones are just a little bit different now and really zoom in and um that's it's passable it's not great it's a little glossier than this guy um so if you're matching barks wow my steering um if you're matching barks you want to make sure that you've got the same values going on in here um as far as this should not be as glossy as it actually is right now so we would want to bring down this value and that's going to help blend these guys together i think that since i'm sharing so many things on my screen froze a second for me there all right since we're zoomed in on this thing and we can see how hideous this weld is this is a good chance to fix this guy all right now i'm pretty low poly and if you go and describe my own this is a shining intersection meaning it's really noticeable it's on the first set of generator branches um so this is where i want my welds on and the tree from here on out i don't know if i need them i definitely don't need them anywhere else in the upper canopy um and that would be in skin and welds so whenever you get to the upper canopy you turn welding off and that's going to help you run faster and smoother and not waste any extra polygons on this guy i need a couple more polygons because this is not going to cut it for us so we're going to go to segments i got a question should i say lod i said skin tab i've got people asking me questions sorry about that no sir that was related to something else in the chat um okay i was trying to figure out trying to figure out what was going on there or just freeze all right back on track here all right our segment count in here i want um backup so you can see i want less segments up here but i want to concentrate them down here so i can do some cool things with noise and give this area a little bit more character the first thing i'm going to do is kind of add some more into the welds and we don't want to go over here overkill here and um one of the things i just made a mistake on is that you probably want to do your segment counts in high and then you're going to go through and you're going to check and make sure that the medium and the low are still in a good place for you so um in high when you're on the this area of the tree and then once you start getting to the upper canopy it's going you're going to notice that it's going to run slower and slower the more generators you add and so um when you're getting the upper part of the tree you want to model in the low resolution and so before your final goes out you'll switch to high to make sure everything's okay um i hope that made sense um this guy here we're gonna add a couple more segments now um this absolute versus relative in here um segment counts are much better uh to let the computer decide for you based on the length of the branch so i blend heavily to the relative number of segments rather than having an absolute when it comes to the twigs or things that i need to control pretty hard i might use an absolute two and have two segments total uh and some of those little little guys up near the top of the tree um so i'm gonna add just a few more in here and i'm gonna make the concentration of them a little bit lower down in the branch because i'm gonna have some noise down here and not at the top as much i actually might do something more like that so i can space these out all right so now i've got plenty of segments i'm probably end up dropping some of those as i don't need them i'm gonna add just a few more radial segments um in the absolute and then i'm going to drop them down because we don't need them higher up in the tree and so we've got something to work with now now this guy here we're going to go back to the weld and adjust that guy there and skin i can offset it a little bit so it's not right up on there and then we can spread out that bottom piece a little bit um check the lighting on there i didn't mean to double click but i did so we shot backwards and there we are um i don't like how squished together that pattern is looking so i might go ahead and do some edits on there [Music] oh man my feed is catching up to me there what's up it's hard it's hard to read comments and keep going at the same time so i'll just leave that to danny have fun all right yeah i'm having trouble keeping it too i'm getting feedback from the slack chat that apparently i i sound like thanos or godlike and i i'm worried that just my voice and not the microphone itself oh yeah we don't want to hear clicking or like random dog noises or anything i don't have a dog there today speech is a dog company we love dogs that'll be another stream i gotta laugh out of that at least um all right one thing i'm not saying in here is you should not have a harsh line in your weld so we're gonna figure out what's exactly going on right here um we should have a little blend piece that's happening here that's gonna be your texture blend and so i'm gonna try to wiggle that and see if it shows up and something is not going on there i don't know where my blend piece is i don't have a wording on this guy oh wait i do because i'm zoomed out all right one of the new things that you have in speed tree nine are these little warning bubbles um are a little bit more in your face but they also point you to where a problem is so you can click on this little guy if you don't see something happening correctly and it's going to tell you exactly what you're doing dumbly and um for right here this is telling me about future vertices and split levels so nothing to do with the weld i thought it was going to tell me my weld was bad but apparently not there so we'll keep working on that if i can't get it to work now then uh we are in beta bear with me there all right so i'm just gonna i'm gonna concentrate on this shape and we're gonna pretend that we have a blind beast right now because i do not i don't know where it went i wonder if my other branches have it i gotta say it doesn't look bad from back here but we didn't want to fix that for later i feel like zooming back you can tell the color difference a little bit more as well i also kind of want to do something with the uv here um so i needed to tile twice in order to split but the scaling of the v i might stretch this out just a little bit just because we can get away with it and i think that this texture is a little repeaty and i kind of need to match the pattern down here to blend a little better and it kind of looks just a little too bright still so to me anyways people will differ people will say all right so we got the weld in better shape i don't have a good picture of actual intersection on a tree but they didn't have little black areas sometimes um we're going to the skin tab and we're just going to kind of play around with the bottom of this branch just a little bit i'm going to widen the bottom just a little bit and make sure this guy has some differences in it so that all of my welds don't look the same so i'm going to add some variation to the lower scale you can see that kind of happening up there and then um we can actually just do little bits of these here and they're gonna help it in the long run and these branches look like uh wormy snakes right now they don't have a lot of character them you can see some of the polygons and we want to go ahead and shape these guys using displacement and give them a little bit more direction as far as what they're doing so i'm gonna go to displacement and um i do not have a displacement map loaded into this we're just gonna use the regular noise pattern in here i'm gonna push the displacement up a little bit more on the bottom of the tree so this branch is kind of shaped down here um you can do some fun things to shape there we can add some variation in there and um fine tune might put a little bit see i've got more polygons down here now i'm going to put some more bumps down here on the bottom um and i kind of want the scale on those guys to be really teeny teeny tiny because i already have big bumps up here and so i'm going to add just a little bit i'm going to turn it down at the top of the branch and we're going to make a scale a lot more um and i don't know just kind of play with it a little bit get it where i want do some weird stuff with the curves just for michael and um if you caught that okay the second thing we want to do and i am definitely zoomed in on this one branch but that's okay because there's only a couple of these main guys and um you want to get some cool shape in here so that tree picture that i showed you there's a curved pattern in here and one of the things that i noticed in these tree branches is that they tend to have a little bump and then a relax and so we're going to try to do that same shape in here with the noise i'm going to go to spine properties and we're going to go we're going to be using path and late noise um i'm gonna look at all of these guys at once so if we turn on the late noise just a little bit this is a nice smooth bump um too much too little i'm gonna use this guy and maybe turn the turbulence up a little bit so they got that little nice bump in there and then one of the things i like to do is um get some movement in here and just kind of tilt this guy up it's got like a nice little bump in there and then i'm gonna turn it off towards the tip of the branch um two reasons for that one just to shake it up um noise tends to send the branches up here a little bit more scattered and um we don't want the direction changing too too too much up there and then i'm gonna turn on just a little bit of gravity up here to get the end of the branch not too much a little bit and we use the curve to do it just on the tip of the branch and you can actually crazy bring out those curves just if you want to drag it up like that all right now that we have some funner bumps in there um we've got kind of a repeaty pattern here where we could do a little bit to shake it up and so these guys don't look too much like each other now one of the things i like to use is path for that um you can draw on the path the shape that you want the actual branch to go and so for this one i'm just gonna make a swoop this is strange this is like a pattern in nature that happens a lot i don't know what the official term for that is i call it a troop following along that is another important vocabulary word yes um i gotta make it abrupt uh and we're going to actually put that path on these branches and we're going to offset these guys so it uses the shroop at different points and that'll kind of mix up what these guys are doing it's very very slight very subtle if i had a straight branch you can see what the path is doing a little easier i actually just kind of want to rotate these now that i've got them in there i feel like the uh may have rotated them too much and they're sort of aligned somehow again you can change up the uh the way these guys interact um i still feel like you know they put some spiral on there kind of got them all on the different sides of the tree now not all on that one side i fixed my problem okay now that we're getting up in here um the first thing we want to check because we are getting higher up in the tree is we want to check our segments really fast and make sure that we do not have an obsessive amount of segments for upper canopy which we kind of do we're going to go ahead and turn this down and instead of taking less out of the length segments i'm going to turn on a little bit of [Music] optimization sorry properties and segments i turn it just a little bit and it's going to try to take the polygons out where i don't need them i'm also going to drop the radial segments down with the protocol curve because i don't really need them towards the tip of the branch we are modeling for back here this is the distance between the tree and so a lot of people struggle with where to add polygons a lot of artists just want all the polygons all the time and uh i don't blame you i like polygons too but uh you really only need to add them when you see sharp angles um or if you're going to be this close to the tree like that's not that pretty but we're never going to be up in the tree that goes okay first thing i've noticed is that these kind of go a little wider than i expected sometimes it's hard to see the canopy shape that you have created so i turn it around to the back um and so we don't want a scoopy tree like that so we'll have to figure that out as they go i'm gonna go ahead and add a couple more of these mid-range branches i'm gonna change the generation style was on absolute one i'm gonna put it on interval again and i'm going to say i want two and it's gonna make two branches across from each other kind of parallel and i want to use these branches as the main structure to fill and form my circular leaf areas and so i added two and i know [Music] they're across there but i'm gonna use um excuse me i'm going to use the spiral to pull them around the different branches we lost danny we don't know where he went hopefully it will come back we'll find out okay so i'm i'm making a fluffier upper canopy by spiraling these guys around um i don't want a whole lot of branches on the inside of my canopy but i don't think we're too bad here so i think if this guy because i've got so much noise if this guy was um starting sooner it might run into my main branch every now and again but i think we're we're in the clear there um something i like to do with the branches that are now starting to grow outward um is use ancestor to pull them towards the parent branch so we've got the direction from these guys and it's going to kind of listen to that if you um push the end on there i want the tip of it to listen not the ends i'm going to put this on linear growth and now they're kind of all doing their thing there and um one of the things that in the tree if you notice there are let me go back to this one just go to um we do have gravity in here and this tends to grow up and out and then kind of droop back down and then our leaves themselves actually kind of hang off the tree and use a lot of gravity so our little tiny twigs are what we're gonna get that gravity shape from i reference the photo all the time [Music] hey so real quick uh someone was asking earlier in the chat about being able to bring in reference photos um i was wondering if you could maybe demo that at some point just to kind of show how to bring an image into the background is that something that you could do or is that how are we not quite the best sorry i missed part of that how i referenced the photos no no i had to bring in a reference photo directly in the background and speak tree oh sure that'll actually only take a second you can go to window properties and put the background style on either a stretched image or i like letterbox because it makes it a little tinier and then you can go ahead and select your image you just need to save it to your desktop somewhere um and that's going to load it in the background there i personally actually like wow windows noises i actually really like um i'm modeling on a solid dark color because if i'm working on a white tree it's just easier to see shape and color and stuff like that um i left it an ambient light because uh that's just what you're gonna see most of the time does that help yeah i think that hopefully answers their question okay why don't we just go ahead and leave this on the dark color because it's just so much easier to see with this bark and you can kind of see this whole structure that you're going for um it really is a lot of zoom in zoom out zoom in zoom out when you're getting the bass ready yeah the aesthetic is nice for sure um and um actually don't know we actually are over the hour we had intended to stream but i'm just going to keep going because we didn't get very far but it's because i talked a lot yeah so oh now everybody's excited about the slate background so pretty good choice okay um i think that what i want to do now that i'm looking at this is actually make these start a little lower than i had originally intended so we got that guy back in there i don't i don't hate it and i think i actually made these guys a little too big at the top i'm going to go back to my spine and kind of bring down the length of those upper branches i actually want my extension long and i want these guys to go down so i'm going to put a point in there and kind of lower the guys in the middle and then bring my extension one back up um these guys i feel like should be pointing straight up so at the top of the tree i'm going to use gravity um to grab my branches down there and i'm going to pull those guys up and i kind of wouldn't mind right now bringing these bottom ones doing a little swoopy thing yeah why not um i like to add a little bit of variation in gravity too i think it adds a nice touch i do this on that one i'm gonna go ahead and grab brush three and my voice is getting scratchy i can add a variation of gravity in there this is kind of fun [Music] organic movement that's my dog is that your dog [Music] if i don't talk to error all day he gets upset and then barks at me whenever he hears other noises danny has a very cute dog who's also his sidekick named arrow so you got the hair hero right now i feel like artists at least have a cat or a dog or something artists should have companion animals um i'm gonna take a sip of water really fast and everybody in the world can hear me slurp um all right back on track all right we get uh not bad um we're gonna see what we look like now we want to start making the fill branches that are going to hold all of the leaves and so we don't want to get too overwhelmed in a vfx tree this is not that many levels up in a games tree you probably want to definitely not have that many levels up um but we have a lot more wiggle room here there's so few pollies all right so we're going to add a set of twigs onto that guy i'm going to use the um branch template for little twigs for these guys there's actually a difference between little one twigs i'm gonna use the twig one and um these guys have a nice spread to them but the start angle right off the bat looks a little wrong to me so i'm gonna go ahead and change that to point a little bit more towards the end and then i'm going to use the curve according to the branch and say that i want those guys to open up a little bit down there and we definitely don't want these to align um now would be a good time to look at your tree and decide what the upper canopy um now we've got some dog powers who's heart of the thread yeah we showed arrow we debated we should just get our dog and just sit in the window so that we do you think you think you could show uh calendar oh no i'd have to lift them up the stairs to bring them up here both of my dogs are scared of stairs that's kind of fun yeah all right we wanna we wanna start looking at the branch phylo taxi so for this it's better to find a close-up picture of the branch um let me see if i can zoom into this one because i don't think i found a great one apparently i didn't it was really gnarly um maybe dana can find me one we'll zoom into this guy oh this is a nice high-res photo i can totally do that so um all right we're gonna start looking at phylo taxi up here and how these guys are put together and by phylotexty i wish i had broken down if you look at one branch um you're gonna see that the little branches are not completely aligned with each other and looks like there's a pattern in here it looks like there's two branches on either side and they are alternating so we're going to do the same thing with ours this is where it's good to switch to phylotaxi interval's totally fine for the same thing but since we already used it we'll switch just to show you um i'm gonna put this on opposite because those two branches were opposite and um just just because i can't say that word i don't know what it means and we're going to go ahead and focus on one of the branches you're going to hit f on your keyboard getting silly now i guess and kind of zoom in here and it's totally okay to work zoomed in you just want to remember to back up every now and again and see what you're doing make sure you're not totally out of there for that so okay the twigs we just added are these guys and you can see that they are not quite aligned and they're on the same side of the branch um we are gonna make these guys just a little bit longer because we need to get a lot of fill branches off of that and i don't think that's too many um right now i like to fill out and then we go from there from here we want to add a little noise to them probably and i'm going to use gravity ever so slightly on them ever so slightly all the way um we'll do something like that on the end of the twigs here we can do a lot with curves the trunk i should have renamed it you can but we're gonna trunk two and then say according to the trunk maybe like don't have these guys and the reason i'm doing that is i want these to fill out and make fluffy and i want the end of these guys um the key to isolate i miss that is f on your keyboard f as in frogs um okay so we've got some droopiness going on in here i don't think we have the length of these guys quite right so we really want longer branches on the inside and smaller branches shorter branches on the outside of that and that's going to make a circle shape for this entire branch thing i could use shape control on here but i don't feel like it's very prominent on the tree and um sometimes this is just as easy to go ahead and manually make that shape with the branches so i'm gonna grab these guys i'm going to spine length um two links to choose from here i'm gonna do it from the percent of the parents so that these will automatically kind of adjust the farther they do the tree and i'm gonna kind of grab i'm gonna say according to that second branch there i'm going to make the ones on the inside a little bigger and i really have no idea why these guys are so wide open down here and i'm gonna fix my start angle there i've got i guess i did do that i don't remember when i did that but we're gonna maybe make that a little less extreme this happens all right and we want our actual leaf holding twig snacks and one thing i didn't check with these twigs is to make sure that our material or sorry our segment count is not crazy again which is just something we do over and over and over again it's really not too bad we're gonna add another set of twigs oh sorry trunks and then we're going to start branches and we're going to twigs you can copy if you like are repeating the same pattern which probably would have been a better idea for me just then um i'm gonna take out some of the segments because these are my teeny tiny twigs and so putting optimization a little bit more on these guys and we really don't need that many regular sickness the kind of flat is okay up here um and these guys are going to hold my leaves we are going to stick with that same pattern and put violet taxi on and then put it on opposite and i might end up having more of these i'm going to put gravity just a little bit on these and you'll notice the link so i'm getting some really teeny tiny ones in here and we really don't want to do that we want to go to the spine and wipe out the variants in here for just a second so that we can get a better feel for it um it's because of that i'm going to add in some length so i've got sort of the same repetitive structure going on there you'll notice that branch died when i made it too long and the reason for that is in the skin tab we have these little safety measures on here and it's saying that if it gets too long to go ahead and wipe it out so if you're ever doing those controls and you don't know where your branches went um always check that to make sure that you don't have a setting in there that will cut those guys out um i'm gonna get rid of it for right now just so that you can see and we are gonna go ahead and get a leaf ready to put on the tree um first i've went out yeah it seems like uh it's breaking up a little bit um but we're back now it's gonna be okay okay i don't know oh wait no it seems like uh it seems like it is there we go it's back on twitch okay okay i don't know what i did where twitch did something but hopefully we're back in good shape i can always pause i just didn't realize that we were down for a second okay um so we want to bring in a leaf material we're going to go up here to add and we are going to go to our leaf folder and we're going to go to birch one you can obviously use something that you purchase if you get something from qixel or if you made your own um these are the speak tree leaves that we're using and looks like we're back up a couple places at once um i'm gonna grab my birch leaf and first thing i noticed is that blow down subsurface all right the first thing we want to do for the leaf material since i've got it in there is to make a cutout for it so before i add leaves on the tree before i do any pbr we want to build a seed leaf i'm going to hit edit by the way you have three tabs here now um that's a little bit variant different from the old version um go in here and you've got some new goodies in the leaf cutout editor too which is pretty neat for v9 um we have added a better it's always going to show you you can show the opacity or not show the opacity and we're going to put our pivot point right on the end of the leaf right here and we are lining that and um this neat little thing was actually kind of a take on the older version of speech where you could pick the number of vertices that you want um i can say seven and just try to get it to try um i wasn't lacking that for some reason i might need to restart my cutout because something was not working that happens right there we're going to try this again bridge cutout to edit the mesh the cutout editor is not working i got some comments coming in i will be right back um are you restarting the uh we're gonna try it on a leaf too see if we get the same thing going hey this is the fun of doing uh demos on top that's still an alpha pressure yeah i'm gonna pull in the second leaf while we're doing that all right let's see if we got working so there's a slight chance that i might need to restart from what i'm doing here i wonder if the background image the solid color is actually missing with it let's try that and then if that doesn't work i might need to restart and i will be back momentarily uh yeah sarah's michael michael's saying that you're gonna need to restart okay it must be a nun bug and we'll get to that so if you guys give me just a second you can talk to danny while you're gone i'm gonna put the uh yeah uh so i'll i'll just answer a few questions in the chat while we're waiting um uh let's see yeah the the cluster window that's something that's we definitely are trying to address um but i think that's something that's in the works i don't know if it's made it to the latest version of nine uh levity you're asking about the idea of a um like a tree stool where people can sell their trees that's definitely something that we've talked about that we've looked at doing um but i don't think we're quite there yet in being able to kind of moderate and support that kind of user interaction um you know that is one of the limitations of speed tree that you can't resell trees we definitely uh you know don't want to limit people in terms of how they're using speed tree but that is one of the kind of necessary restrictions that we have but as soon as we kind of come up with a good way to kind of unleash that and let people sell speed trees whether it be for our store or whether it be on other people's store we're definitely gonna be excited to see what people do with it but for right now that's not something that we have available and i think sarah's back we're back we're working here love those beta bills um all right so we are that let's go to that first leaf and that we were on that birch leaf two someone brought in a second ago and then birch all right so we're going to go ahead and create the cutout and we have lines now and that was the magic point there we need those lines all right trying to show you all the magic here you can just say that i want seven and it's gonna try it's best to find them now this is not necessarily a great fold area so it did what i asked it to but we're gonna make it a little better um i'm gonna put the edge there i'm gonna put the pivot right on the edge of the leaf and then i don't wanna clip anything so that was kind of outside there i'm gonna put um that guy there now when you're making the leaf mesh you don't want to click outside this box or you'll lose your work there so we have all these save buttons here for highest resolution medium resolution and lowest resolution um you can always put that saved file back in there by using that i'm going to put one in the middle here so that my leaf can fold and the vertice lines that go across the leaf are going to help it curl so the more brutus is in there that makes sense um help us get shape and then if you put these guys in there without any meaning if they just are cut across at random places it actually changes up the shape of really a lot um i'm going to put a lot of verses in the high i got a quick question there i'm just going to keep going because i can't read that fast apparently um okay i'm going to put a lot of verses in here to begin with and then take them down for the other versions i want this to be able to curl in the middle so that extra one i'm kind of deciding to spend it it might be that i take it out later because we have too many polygons but we're just gonna try for looks first and then go from there i'm gonna save that guy out um and make sure i'm not so when you have this guy in these guys are connecting you want to make sure you don't have a little sliver there you want to make sure that guy hits and there's not a double line there so sometimes you might have something like that and you would use the mask tool to get that vertice out oh we don't super need that we just need to make sure that we don't have tiny slivers in there um great so that should work for us and clip anything um oh i did have the angle of the not quite on the veining there all right and then i'm going to kill that guy and then save out my medium and then i'm going to kill these side folds and that's going to be my low i could probably drop down more if i need to on the low later um now we have a working leaf mesh to start going on from so we are gonna add a leaf mesh to the tree we're to go add and we're just going to add just one and we want batched leaves for these guys which is in default my vision's going blurring apparently because i can't read anymore look at me and all right we are going to assign this so we're going to go to material and then that leaf that we just cut out was birch one of the things you'll see there is that i don't have double sided on yet so we're gonna go to the settings for this guy and say two-sided and just real fast just to stay organized i'm gonna rename this real fast to birch leaf one um ideally you would have to rename these but we're gonna just fix that little bit there okay and um first things first is uh we have a lot going on here in the subsurface it's got so much subsurface that it's pretty much wiping our color out like if you were to turn this off right now you can see the color difference is just crazy because this map is white so we want to tone this down a bit we're going to actually i don't have a lot of information in this map apparently the scan was just a little blown out and so something that we can do to fix this is actually load in the color map for the subsurface um red sheet a little bit i guess we can load it right into the subsurface amount again and we're going to do something to it to make it a little bit more accurate oh it's like night closure so um this is actually has the veining with more light shining through it so what we're going to do is we're going to invert it and this is actually a little bit more similar to more sub-surface information that should go in it's really hard to say the word subsurface several times in a row my goodness um we're still getting a lot of light from that and very saturated kind of blue color from the color map um the second thing we want to do is make sure that this guy is in the right range i'm going to turn it to albedo check and we are good on that hopefully we can adjust this a little bit and make the veining pop just a little bit um back to the color map i don't really like the color that it's reading as i'm actually going to put a little bit of red in there and just to make it a stronger green that doesn't read blue um and bring down that tip color just a little bit and then our subsurface would be a little bit yellower and a little bit brighter than in in real life there you can test that by shining the light around me and these leaves are ugly so far we'll try to fix them up all right it's just like a strong i think we can go a little brighter on that just to make it a little contrast um something that helps subsurface a lot is a uh just a gradient like a global fade out there i like to add those into the map sometimes we won't do a lot of photoshop work since we're live it just would take a second um the ao in this guy again it's pretty bright um i can bring it down a little bit or exaggerate it we'll set the ao and get that a little later um all right let's get these leaves some actual shape now they just look like weird cookies hanging out all right i'm gonna focus on one branch right now um just the one that the leaves are coming off of which would be the little tiny guy and um just for orientation size okay so my little guy's down here and this leaf is still really really tiny compared to the tree the first thing i like to do is to figure out how many should go on the tree is to get the size of the leaf approximately right and these will actually be bigger than real life and it's just to fill up the space and you can get away with that because you're down here looking up at it um so this is you know probably magnolia size leaf but we can go a little bit bigger than we need to i'm going to zoom back in and then we want to get the phylo taxi right on these guys i'm pretty sure these are alternating leaves um we can go ahead and reference a picture if we need it of course they're gonna be really tiny i thought i had a leaf picture okay it's really tiny kind of blurry um they're coming out from either side of the branch i'm pretty sure they're alternating i'm pretty sure i could google it but i don't know if i wanted google live all right and we want to put some more of these on the tree so we are going to go instead of absolute we want to go to filo taxi and we're going to put these on alternate alternating and then we're going to change up the length between them and now we have sort of a friendly looking thing there um these guys first off the bat there i know that they need to be aligned a little bit they're going to go towards the end of the branch and then i'm going to use the curve according to the twig to make them a little spread out so they're not overlapping um so this is more like a green ash structure right now i'm not quite reading the same way the next thing we want to do is give them some shape so we're going to go to skin and we're going to fold them and we're going to curl down and obviously the thing about leaves is that you don't want them to all be doing the same thing so we can really really shake up the shape of this by adding that alternate leaf in there and then by adding variables to pretty much everything in here so that these are all turning and facing the different ways we're going to use twist a lot um twist is going to twist like that um but instead of adding it there we are just going to add variants in there that all twist different ways and then in the orientation we are going to make them face just ever so slightly differently and fold ever so slightly differently repeat myself accidentally there we want this leaf because we are in high and i've got so many polygons in here we can actually add a little bit of um excuse me vertex displacement so these have a different shape on each and so i'm going to put just a little bit in there maybe smaller amounts and we're going to see we're gonna go ahead and back up and see what we look like on the full tree for a second there's too much of a frond motion going on here and the first thing that really is a dead giveaway is that these are fake leaves is that they're all the same size i want to go ahead and add some variants in here i'm going to put favorite outliers on because i've got more of the same going on there um i like to add cohesive on cohesive variants on for some of these branches so that there's mimicry between each branch that goes on so i'm going to play around with that a little bit i don't know if that made sense or not and um so we've still got some work to do i think these are actually just maybe a little too long um and they're still they still seem kind of big so we are going to use a curve and kind of drop those down on the end of the twig a little bit i'm gonna add one little random section in there and i'm gonna make the twigs a little shorter i feel like now that i'm looking at them farther back they're just a little crazy on some of them okay so now we need a secondary set of fullness in there so we've got twigs and one of the easiest things to do is add way way way too many twigs you want to get fullness in the upper canopy without adding you know 40 000 twigs um and something we do often is add a second set of leaves all right just copying with ctrl c and i'm pasting um we've got our main guys here and we've got these guys doing a down shape so to get fullness in here i'm gonna add that same set of twigs to that upper twigs we're gonna have these guys do something completely different that i would not be able to set on these guys um you really should try to get everything that you need in one generator um but when it calls for it you can always come in here and add different motion there so with these two twigs i'm going to lift them up a little bit so instead of doing the down gravity i'm going to maybe turn them off and then maybe have the twig the edge go down a little bit or something shape i don't want them to generate in the same spot so i'm going to maybe add some more space between these guys i'm going to make them a little longer they look like worms that was unintentional i think i got a little too fancy with my gravity there you can see this repeat shape a little too much so we're just gonna mix it i don't always do the right thing first i'm gonna make the uh start angle a little wider on these guys and i'm actually going to take out those leaves for just a second there and add the same twigs i don't know if you guys noticed but you guys have an entirely new um generator layout now you can switch back and forth it's a lot more organized that's going to keep your tree sections in different spots now if you've got like a bunch you can right click these things now and actually change the icon color so if you want a hot pink tree or purple tree you can organize this by color it's kind of neat oh and you can search for stuff now when you can't find stuff there's a menu up here for you know looking for noise uh there's a favorite window too so there's lots of new easy fast tools i hope somewhere in the developer is like yes the appreciated i needed for that very very tiny thing that i added to the modeler but someone's excited about it okay we got something that looks like a tree so far but we still have not captured the essence of what's going on on the leaves i won't keep working on them um i guess i'm just talking one of the things that's really killing it is the fact that they're all the same color um you can add the variant color in here and we probably won't get to adding on all of the seasons i'll probably do that in a different video that's just nothing but seasons and loading those in i want to revisit the pbr though because um we are reading blue still and our gloss is very very low i'm gonna kinda come back in here and there's just not a whole lot so like right here i'm not getting any detail from the tree and that is because the normal map is so soft and light ideally probably have a better more pronounced normal map but there's a couple things you can do inside speed tree to make that look a little bit more realistic i'm going to focus on a branch again and we are going to one boost that normal amount just a little bit just to see if we can get something out of it hey it's not bad not great this scans a little bit uneven so i've got some direction thing going in there but we're gonna be playing normals anyways so it's probably not too bad um we are going to go to the lighting controls and make this leaf a little puffier um just down here and then skin you use lighting controls a ton for game tree but on a vfx tree you really want to use these as part of the art i'm gonna add um now parent prophecy looks at the branch that it's from actually it has an anchor that you can see so you can control what it's looking to i really just want normal puffy for these because i don't really care for this which way they're pointing i just want to add some roundness to the leaf and um that little area in there does not look so great because of this normal map it's puffing this part that's bent so if you show the normal it's just gonna help you see what's going on in there and spiky um we're going just a little too much so we're gonna back down off of that control and then that's gonna help with that shadowing a little bit but it gives it just a little bit you can add some variation here so they're all doing something different and um i really just don't like the colors we chose in here because they are reading two blue so we're gonna go ahead and make it a better green somewhere like a true rich very springtime green uh make this maybe a little yellower and then turn that down just a little bit and um this subsurface amount we can actually use this to get some of the veining and control in um super saturated like fresh out of spring we're gonna contrast that just a little bit maybe bring it down so we don't lose all that information see that's a little harsh that's not so much nothing too crazy and the um the veins in there a little too black this one really does this one really would benefit from the um the gradient added on top as well all right another neat trick to switch up the size of these guys i still have just the one leaf on the tree i'm gonna turn normals off because they're a little crazy looking um we want to play with the scale a little bit um these leaves are actually a little bit fatter and longer than we are on the actual tree but adding some variation in here will help not just the size of the leaf but help switch up the actual leaf shape a little bit better and those simple things are just really what help hide i think that what we're going to do is use orientation and have the leaves at the end of the branches actually go to sky influence so i'm going to turn this up a little bit and then on the end of the tip of the twig i'm going to turn it down so these guys kind of have free reign for what they do and from there we want to maybe kind of look at it from up above and see how our patterns are doing i think we can actually do with a few more um twigs in here these guys um go ahead and make them a little closer together and i'm gonna make these guys a little bit and then these guys up here at the littles twigs we want to use ancestor a little bit on them i feel like because they are just awkward no one likes an awkward twig there's not a lot of shape on these guys either and they are pretty low poly you can add noise on them but i would suggest that the turbulence be kind of down low um so there's more of one bump in them rather than a bunch of small bumps because that will send your leaves going off different ways how you doing danny i'm doing good arrow is uh he's getting hungry it's it's right about that time when um he's just kind of getting ready for dinner so he's just barking at me so i'm trying to calm down a little bit it's more dinner time yeah yeah i think we are coming up on a we'll probably cut this live feed off at five and what we will do is what we did not finish today we will just keep going on this tree or go through everything with you we're gonna put seasons on here and get it completely in working order and then we're gonna take this exact same tree and make it a game tree um but there will be several different sessions of this for sure um you see this really awkward branch right in here yeah yeah this is you know turn around and see what's going on in here this is a two-long branch with too few segments in it and we're gonna go to skype mode to see that real fast there's literally no length segments in this and so for something that long we want to fix that it's just problem solving skills um sometimes up in the twigs i like to go ahead and have an absolute two because they'll be able to bend a little bit and have that in there and this one's just such a skinny sliver and you're not muted so your typing is so loud all right i'm sorry that mechanical keyboard you know i got questions just rolling in we had all right i'm going to turn optimization on optim excuse me off it that is why i added two absolute segments so i'm not seeing them show up and that's why i'm getting so awkward i'm actually just turn it off for a second and wow all the polygons in there we don't want those in there these are teeny tiny twigs that's just a waste of money so we want to go ahead and take out the relative for a second and see how we're doing with two and then i think that we need to add a little bit in there just because they're not i mean we're pretty in the end there um that will help us out a little bit that's just still too many for twigs all right that's not bad we'll see how we're doing on the whole tree we've got only uh 200 000 so it was a pretty small tree so far but we have not added in all of our leaves we've got a fullness thing that we're working on here let's look at the whole tree for a second and so we've got some awkward things that we want to fix in here first things first is i did not realize i made these things point up i don't know if i really like that or not so i'm going to fix those and put it back in regular excuse me regular mode this is the most i've talked since covet had started so my voice is definitely not adjusted to people real people hey sarah real quick um someone just asked a good question what's your poly budget for this tree what's my poly count yeah paulie like what kind of account are you looking at for the finished trade here okay this is a vfx tree so if we're going by our library standards um our high resolution model if it's a large broad leaf tends to be like three million we definitely don't have to use that many um one of the great things about the conversion tool is that you can super super optimize these things um so this big tree here and the end um i would not feel bad if i went up to uh this honestly does not have this is a pretty sparse tree branch and tree wise and it's also not very tall so i would like to keep this one under one million um medium would be more about like 500 000 and then when we try to go maybe like 200 000 so low so um we're not in bad shape oh i must have been reading wrong because i'm not i'm half a million i must have been selecting somewhere i wasn't to see i always do this at the end of the tree but i click on each individual generator and i see where i'm spending these guys um so we do kind of get the shape down first and then we want to go back and check our segments and make sure there's not something in there so right off the bat when i click those twigs um welding is off and that's good this is in a good amount that's fine just making sure that those are off for sure that's a good check it's also good to not get template happy and just start adding a bunch of templates in just make sure you're watching what you're putting into the scene so you don't suddenly have a 10 million triangle tree and you're running very very slow it will keep working i've made some pretty high quality things in here but we don't want to like you know crash your computer or anything um this vfx modeler that i'm working in will export to cinema 4d max maya houdini uh what else am i forgetting and it also will export to clarisse and we have an additional clarisse engine product that's its own standalone thing yeah the uh compatibility especially it's important remember that those are just the programs that we have a import script for um but really it will uh you know export to anything that contains fbx or obj um so if you're working in a custom program um just remember that it will export that on the game side we'll export to ue4 community or lumberyard and we also export fbx and obj over there too on the indy or in our full games package before i fix anything on the rest of the leaves since we got that going on um the stick straight thing going on with my main trunk i kind of skipped straight to building here i'm gonna go grab this guy and add a little bit of life back to it by using the path tool uh i'm gonna go ahead and make it have a little meh forgot to push the draw button this is a fun sound effect i kind of add some little crinkles to it and maybe get some life going in it i've got it pulled up pretty strong right now with the gravity um i might need to like relax that a little bit and then i'm going to go add some noise late noise again because um really noise would make it go crazy fast do that but i really don't want all of that i just want a little that little bump there that's a nice look i'm gonna kind of like grab that and then grab the end of the tree back down just to give it less of a stick straight boring thing going on there all right also since we're in here and talk about things that make the tree look actually realistic and right now these branches are not cutting it and i want to add some loved ones to them so we are going to add broken branches and some knots and some things on there to make them look nice um and then we got about 10 more minutes so this is probably a good stopping point for the day what we'll do when we pick up next time is work on the leaves we'll put some seasons in here we'll talk about seasons offsets to get color variations and hopefully show you some more of the v9 features um make sure that sounds like a good plan so okay so adding some short branches in here and things to make this actually look like a tree and not just like a tube um we want to go to templates and add um we've got built-in decorations these are fun to use and everything but i'm just going to start with a bunch of trunk i'm sorry branches i'm going to use the bifurcating one because they're going to come off where i've added noise and i probably have too many of them to start but that's okay we're going to change the length up on this to very very very small i don't want percent apparent for that i just want absolute nubs we're creating the nubs and i want these to not extend that's off that's good we're going to add a cap to the end of this which i had to remember where it was and then sitting there in front of my face um we want these to be very different sizes we're going to go ahead and skin and put this way up and you'll see there i don't have enough polygons on the branch so i'm getting a weird triangular looks like some sort of weird cheese um let's go ahead and add some radial segments in there oh sorry they used to be there and it throws me every time i go to do the slider and it's the wrong spot this is actually a really cool feature that we've got where you can add polygons now to a specific area so that you can sculpt and i'm going to go ahead and add just a few more to get that cap out we're going to shape that cap cat needs some polygons too go in there with the radial on the lip and we want to add some a lip on this guy just because it's not looking so great right now i'm going to pump that up a little bit so there's another layer and then slope him maybe uh you can make these look kind of like they're broken off there and we don't really need a texture to put in here one of the cool things about the new conversion tool is that if i see something on here that i want to use as a knot um so let's say i wanted to take this texture here out i could actually set up one of those guys and then i'd have a text material for that knot area i would add a second mesh converter to the mesh and then i would take my bottom hold down t place it on the trunk where i need it grab the top which is way up here that's why i couldn't find it hold down t place the top and i need it not where i place the top i need to grab that again grab the b and i'm gonna make a little square texture just right here real fast um i don't need a band on this at all so um i really just want to crop it down to this it's all you need for a knot you don't need it to wrap or anything so um i'm just going to disable the band because i don't need it and we are going to you know it's in a fine spot i don't need to really adjust the clearance or anything i'm just going to grab it really fast i don't need this texture to be very big either so we're just going to send out a tiny one and we're going to um make that a new material and we're just going to call them in the bark holder we're going to call this not one and it's going to be a rectangular and so what you would do is actually just take it into photoshop real fast and slice it down to just use that knot area we're gonna slap it on there just to see what we got all right this should have shown up here we're gonna go back up to our broken there it was me go up high enough drop that knot on and um ideally if i had gone in here and chopped this out in photoshop i would have this little section here i could pump the normal up a little bit if i want to do some custom work in there to make it look more right now a little messy but we will work on that probably next week because i think we are running low on time and um that is how far we made it today i think we did okay probably could go a little faster if i didn't have to think and talk and swim around at the same time i thought we would be much farther here it's always faster if you don't have to think if you can just like let it flow we should have one that's pretty much just like speed building i'm gonna race yeah i'm gonna have like danny building in one building in a one window have someone mine mine would be so much slower sarah you're so much faster we can accept the challenge we'll have challenge takers just kind of pull your name out send us an email um but we are trying to break down exactly what we're doing it's uh been fun and i think that that is it for today i also have um if you guys want to check out the v9 video i can play that for you now in the live stream or you can go check it out with the link that we've got posted um so yeah before we get to that are there any more questions in the chat yeah yeah i'm just trying to sk i was trying to scram the scan and see if i'd missed any questions that i can answer before i go yeah let me check the choice real quick see if there's uh see some questions that we had is how often we'll be doing these sessions and when the next will be announced um we will be probably announcing the next one and kind of a schedule for these things next week probably on monday um this is pretty new for us so we're still kind of experimenting with the formats let us know what you guys like and what it like um and uh and we'll try to make it a better experience for you um but we'll probably try to do this probably once a week is what i'm thinking um and you can keep an eye on our twitter facebook uh everything like that we'll make sure you guys are aware of it we'll probably have it on our uh newsletter as well um yeah let's see something else that you have tips to add details to the final levels usually the trick please take two minutes and uh not good enough or close-up um that is so when i was talking about our distance between modeling um typically when you're dropping this and they seem to get rendered out you're thinking about fill trees so this would be a tree that would be about right here distance wise when you're doing a specific shot or when this branch will be framing a area where you need it instead of putting less polygons in the end branches like i did this is typical workflows that we try to keep polygons out up here you would spin them a little differently so we would end up putting more polygons up here and our trunk is actually not the part in the shot or maybe it is um we have to be creative about where we take those from um a lot of what you'll see we'll go over this a little bit uh once we get this all filled but offsets are something that let us place fine details and segments out here we might have the nice mesh on the outside of the branch here and then on a really dense tree i don't need polygons on the inside so i would end up either pruning out the interior and having the outside full so you can't see that there's stuff missing in here or just offsetting those segments so that there's ugliness on the inside of the tree and then pushing them out so we'll definitely work on optimizing this a little bit better as we keep going it's still in its very scraggly teenage tree years i think this is not a finished product so far um so yeah a lot of what people will do will make a they'll make a really nice branch they like they'll make their tree and then make a file that is literally just a branch with fine-tuned details um not unlike the sample file that you get in the growth folder of modeler where we just have uh one branch hanging with seasons we've got like all kinds of little nubs and things going on on there um and they'll stick just the branch in the foreground of this the scene so it frames in the shots so that's something people do um i hope that answers and i'm kind of scanning to see if there's anything else we are going to do the trees interacting with each other um we're going to cover uh some things like vines crawling over something and then branches interacting with each other and like the next one probably coming up um we will try to put a schedule up probably so that we can cover everything yeah yeah there's so many things to cover it's uh it's gonna be hard but we'll uh we'll work out something and um we appreciate you guys uh enthusiasm and feedback and yeah thanks for being trainers with us we'll be back soon with more trees yeah we're really grateful for everybody that showed up to watch so thank you guys um that's it for now i guess we will see you and we continue this and thank you very much you

Channel: SpeedTree YouTube

Views: 16,821

Rating: 4.9050446 out of 5

Keywords: speedtree, modeling, breakdown, livestream, tutorial, how to, vegetation, nature, foliage, tree, birch

Id: A5XXPylQSxU

Length: 111min 51sec (6711 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020