Modeling Trees in Blender with Sapling Addon (included in Blender) I Course Trailer and Lesson 1

[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to this blender training course about creating a stylized forest environment over the span of 14 videos you will learn a broad spectrum of skills including low poly modeling from scratch generating trees and plants with the sapling add-on populating grass and trees with particles material creation lighting and rendering with eevee as well as final tweaks with the compositor it's a comprehensive environment creation project but thanks to the stylized poly aesthetic each step of the process is simpler than its realistic counterpart while i thoroughly enjoy realism the stylized approach is very liberating artistically things like dialing in atmospheric depth to taste sweeping everything with vibrant color gradients and leveraging physically inaccurate materials to focus viewers attention overall it's a very flexible and well fun way to create this courses four hours of general environment workflow outside the box tips and tricks and guidance for honing your artistic vision i will see you in the forest the first asset i want to create is trees and remember the overarching theme for this project is how much we can create very quickly and thankfully blender comes with a tool that allows us to create trees very efficiently and very powerfully it is an add-on and you can find it with stock blender if you go to edit preferences and in your add-ons panel search for sapling whoops misspelled it so major props to andrew and aaron for creating this it is so so powerful and we are going to create our trees with it so make sure that you have that enabled and then in our fresh blender scene i'm going to select everything with a hit x and delete because for right now i don't want anything in the scene just a bare 3d canvas now to create a tree with sapling you want to hit shift a to bring up your add menu and in the curve panel at the very bottom you'll see sapling tree gin this lives in the curve category because it is based on curved data you'll see that upon clicking that button we get a tree but you want to immediately open the options for the operator now this looks complex as an operator already but look how many menus there are with equally complex settings for each category so this is a crazy complex add-on that you could dedicate an entire course just to explaining each setting and demonstrating their application which is not what we're going to do in this course at best i'm just going to introduce you to the add-on primarily with a workflow of playing with the settings until we get what we want but the most important thing that i want you to take from this is how to work with the add-on because it is a little bit quirky since it's a modal operator we don't have the option to undo right so if i change this setting for example well we didn't see much happen let's say i change a different setting there we go and then i don't want to keep that change we hit control z we lose the entire tree so not having the undo option makes this funky to work with let's start over hit shift a curve and choose sapling tree gem the way i work with this is always keeping a finger on the escape key so if i change that setting again branch distribution and then i don't like it while holding the mouse key i'll hit escape and it will revert back to whatever that setting was when i started so really i keep one finger on escape and another finger on the shift key because a lot of these settings i will want to hold shift and then slowly change them and then hit escape if i need to so that's an important part of the workflow using sapling but without further ado and prefacing let's get into actually creating a tree one other thing you might have noticed is our viewport shading went black so you can orbit around the scene while the options are still available but if i select the tree or anything else basically any other operation we lose the ability to edit those options but navigating is fine and there's a bit of a quirk at least with 2.9 in this version of the add-on where changing some settings seemed to disable the 3d viewport shading but you'll see it come back when i change other settings it's a just a little bit of a minor inconvenience but um the first place i recommend looking is at the bottom of the geometry category where you have presets several of them are pre-defined that come with the add-on like uh kalisternon never heard of that tree that must be the default how about small pine you can see that that changes the aspen tree so i love these for getting started in a general shape that i'm after now the type of trees we want to create are mostly evergreen trees so one of them will be like a christmas tree style fur and then a couple spruce alternatives one with leaves and one without but don't hold me accountable for the names of the species i am not an arborist if you want to correct me please leave a comment that kind of correction is important but the first tree that i want to focus on is going to be based on the fur example the kind of funny part is when i say christmas tree fur this is not the shape i'm expecting and so i'm going to start with this but then change it into a spruce shape or at least what i understand to be a spruce shape and that's going to be a tall tree with a small diameter and so in the geometry tab the first settings that i like to adjust are the custom shape settings and if we hover over what the settings mean they're not that descript look at this base middle middle position and top i don't know if the difference between middle and middle position are so as an artist i just have to start playing with it and frankly that's what i do with the entire add-on so please do not be afraid to play with it until you get what you want so let's i'm going to hold the shift key one finger on the escape key and let's see what this setting does okay it just seems to kind of lengthen the branches at the bottom okay we'll escape that change what about the next one okay so it changes the diameter as a whole this is good because i want the trees to be a little bit shorter so let's hold shift whoops let's escape hold shift and then click and drag to the left okay something more like this what about these other settings okay so this lengthens the branches at the top let's escape there this one probably does the opposite i would have expected okay they both seem to do the same thing now as far as branch distribution this is another setting i like to play with it kind of shifts the focus of the branch concentration either more branches on the top of the tree or more branches at the bottom i do want the branches to be a little more dense at the bottom of the tree so something like this i think is good and of course you can change the random seed if you want to adjust kind of the settings as a whole i'm actually like the default so we'll leave that and i think that's all i'm going to touch in the geometry section because this is starting to shape up the way i want um the next category i'm going to look at is branch radius here you can see that the opengl kind of popped back into place although honestly when i'm adjusting the diameter i kind of want the silhouette but um what i'm trying to do next is to thicken the branches but leave the trunk the same diameter if not shrink the trunk a little bit and so let's just start playing with the first slider the ratio slider so let's just hold okay this is an example where i want to hold shift okay so this kind of thickens the trunk and branches altogether i'm going to hit escape and then radius scale what does that do seemingly the same thing the next one seemingly the same thing branch radius ratio okay so this one thickens the branches more than it thickens the trunk that's good okay so i do want the limbs to be a little bit thicker and read better in silhouette and then minimum radius okay i don't think i want to change any of that i'm going to leave everything else all right so really the only thing i wanted to change there was the branch radius ratio okay all right that looks good in silhouette that should read well in the final scene next let's talk about the branch splitting options all right so at the very top if i remember correctly the levels kind of splits each limb again alright so it looks much more detailed much more limbs splitting off the main limb and the higher you go it will just continue to get more and more dense i think a level of three is all that i want or a spruce that's dead and doesn't have leaves anymore i want this extra detail in branch splitting so that's going to be good now the base splits i don't think is something we want because that okay yeah it splits the trunk itself um so i don't want any of those i want a single central trunk to this tree and then we have some options like the trunk height okay so this moves the overall branches down on the tree or up and i do want the branches to start a little bit lower something like this okay so they're closer to the ground that looks good i think that's all i want to tweak here you can see we're just changing a few settings in each panel and then there's one more i think it's branch growth yes okay i want to change the curvature of the branches and we can do that here in the curvature options now let's just hold shift finger on the escape key and see what this does okay so this curves the entire trunk of the tree and takes the branches with it that's nice but it's not what i want i'm just going to keep it straight up and down for the most part what about the next one this is what i'm after so this will curve the branch either up or down i'm going to make sure that they curve up but i want them to angle down at their root at their base so the down angle let's see if we can make that do what we want all right i see nothing from the first setting what about the second one there we go so i'm going to make these point down and they have a nice little curve to them okay we're basically there um you can see by default there is a slight curvature to the overall tree and i'm fine with that um it doesn't need to be perfectly straight up and down but i don't want it to be overly curved like this or something crazy is there anything else i want to tweak i don't think so this looks like the kind of tree that i wanted so um before i click on anything before i kind of close down the operator and accept what i have keep in mind that we just changed a lot of settings and if i want to tweak any of this i really need to save it as a preset because i won't be able to go back and tweak any of the settings we've changed up to this point so i'm going to go back to the geometry panel and for the preset title i'm going to call this kt my initial and uh spruce and then export preset this preset already exists okay we'll just override it must have been for my rehearsal export preset and now that will appear in the list kt spruce okay so at this point we can finish the operator by doing any other operation like selecting the tree i'm going to rename this spruce underscore a because we will create a variant spruce b and then i guess leave it like that actually no because i will be duplicating this so let's add dot zero zero zero okay this tells me it's the very first original spruce and every duplicate of this tree will be dot zero zero one dot zero zero two and so on now i wanna add some small details to the trunk that we can't do with the add-on so if i tab into edit mode you'll see that remember this is a curve object so we can't actually adjust the mesh data we need to convert it from a curve to a mesh object however what's nice about them being curves is that we can adjust them very easily so let's tab back to object mode and enable our wireframe the trunk of the tree is the kind of low poly geometry that i want but the branches are a little bit too dense i think more dense than what we need them for so we can lower their resolution if we separate the branches into their own object and adjust the curve setting so let's tab into edit mode i'm going to select one spline point on the trunk hit control l and then p separate okay then i'll select the branch curve object by themselves and we'll go to the branch curve settings and the resolution if i lower this to like two that saves significant geometry and the silhouette has hardly changed at all okay so that's that's gonna look good maybe even one yeah you might be able to get away with one level in fact i mean it's a low poly theme yeah i think so i'll leave it like that for now but um expect to eventually merge it with the trunk object but let's focus on the trunk and talk about the slight tweak i want to make so i'm going to select it and then hit the forward slash key to go into local view basically i just want to add some splits in the trunk going vertically that's common in trees because just a simple round cylinder is a little bit too simple for what we want and so i'm going to tab into edit mode well first i need to convert it so in object mode go to the object menu and choose convert to mesh alright so now we can tab into edit mode and we have access to our mesh components and i'm just going to select you know a length of edges and first start to rotate them slightly first as a whole and then start shrinking my selection and continue rotating kind of randomly but you can see that i'm creating variation in that topology and then once i do that i can select the whole thing again and hit control b to bevel it now in the bevel options i like to use the percent because it keeps the bevel width relative to the geometry around it so as the tree trunk gets skinnier up top the bevel will be skinnier and i think that looks pretty good i'm going to increase the segment so now we have an edge in the middle and i'm going to select that middle edge and also rotate that slightly to give it some variety okay kind of keeping it within the bounds of the boundary edges and then alt s will move it inside give it some depth alt s and then i'll taper at the top okay so push it in and then deselect the top edges and continue pushing in maybe do it even further at the bottom okay so we've got kind of a crack to break up that silhouette now uh being low poly and having that aesthetic we can use normals and specifically auto smoothing based on an angle okay so let's disable wireframe all right so here you can see at a value of 30 it's kind of sharpening too many edges like the surrounding edges and i don't want that i want that to appear smooth so i'm going to start taking the value up until we see it smooth out and then the crack in the center starts to get sharp but not the surrounding edges and that creates you know a low poly tree aesthetic and that's going to catch really nice in the lighting and you know add to the style that we're after now i don't hate this the fact that these are sharp some of the boundary edges are sharp but if i want to eliminate that what i can do is cut an edge on either side of that central edge and then push them out okay so alt s but pushing them outward and we have to do that kind of reverse taper but now you know that creates an angle that is not sharpable or hardable it's not going to be a sharp edge based on the angle because we've gone below that threshold okay so that looks pretty good i think nice and low poly tree like and then at the top here we can it's not terribly important but we can try to smooth this out you know we're going low poly so triangles and things like that don't matter but sometimes my model or ocd tries to get rid of those anyway it doesn't matter really at all and so from this point i'm going to do the same thing around the tree and time lapse this because it's the exact same process i'm just changing things like the length of the edge that i'm selecting the placement on the trunk it'll be sometimes further up on the tree sometimes further down and giving it random angles with which to then bevel and eventually adjust the depth of the crack in the center don't forget to rotate that central edge just to give it a little bit more variety if it's too uniform it will show up in the final result it will be noticeable and with that automatic smoothing you can kind of move it to a depth where it'll auto sharpen which is pretty nice though i do tend to smooth out the border so it's not sharp using two new edges and then pushing them out until the angle adjusts also remember to taper the depth at which you push that interior edge because it looks bad to just have the whole thing at the same depth i think this is going to be good maybe one more crack at the very base there we go all right we can leave local view and that's going to be our first tree and i'm very happy with this all things considered it was generated quite quickly using the sapling add-on we will continue utilizing that for the subsequent trees

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 43,328

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, cg cookie, blender environment, blender tree, blender trees, blender forest, 3d trees, 3d forest, modeling trees

Id: SzlvZ9umcSU

Length: 19min 38sec (1178 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020