SpeedTree Cinema 8: Getting Started

welcome to SpeedTree getting started in this video I'm going to introduce you to the modeler and show you some modeling basics for dimming purposes I'm going to start off by making a really basic tree I'm gonna do this by going to our generation window right clicking going to add geometry to selected and selecting our trunk generator you can also add generators by going to the add icon in the generation toolbar are going to the toolbar above the viewport and selecting the tree with the plus sign icon now I'm going to edit my trunk I'm going to go to the property bar on the left hand side go to my spines group and alter the length absolute value I'm gonna go down because I want to make my trunk a little shorter now I'm going to make the top of the trunk a little fatter I'm gonna go to skin radius and I'm gonna push up the right hand side of my blue curve and also you see here this is the flares I want to reduce how fat they are so I'm gonna go to my flares radius and reduce this now I'm going to push the flares up by going up in the height value and I'm gonna pinch it in a little bit now they have a basic trunk shape the next thing I'm going to do is add branches I'm going to go back to my generation window right click and I'm gonna add our big branches template you'll notice there seems to be this empty spot at the top of the trunk you can either add a cap generator to that or choose to go to extend parent and change it from none to any this is basically telling it to grow a branch from that spot another type of branch template you can use is our bifurcated branches with bifurcated branches the child branch basically grows on the bend of the parent branch you can alter where it grows by going to the parent branches spine group noise group and increase the turbulence or the mouth you'll notice when I increase and decrease the late amount the branches change position depending on the bend of the parent to save on time I'm gonna just duplicate the bifurcated branches and attach it on the parent you'll notice it's kind of long so I'm gonna go to spine I'm gonna reduce the spine amount a little bit smaller okay next I'm gonna add the twigs generator I'm gonna go back to my add geometry selected and I'm selecting my twigs you'll notice it seems to be three at the top I'm going to change this by going to the generation group I'm going to increase the frequency that way I have more twigs on the branches and then I'm gonna add some spread that way they're not all bunched together on the same plane next I'm gonna spiral them a little bit now I'm gonna go to spine and I'm gonna make them a little bit longer okay I'm gonna duplicate this now as you can see we now have a tree with a semi complicated branch structure I'm gonna add bark material to this I'll go to the materials tab and then select the plus minus icon and then I'm gonna say add new now I'm selecting okay and I'm gonna go to color and I'm going to select my bark texture so you get this pop-up that asked if it should assign the materials to the corresponding spots and I'm gonna say okay because this saves me time it automatically loads them for me it's always good practice to name your material so I'm gonna go back to the plus and minus icon I'm gonna select the material and rename it to bark okay it's renamed so I'm gonna go back to the property bar on the left hand side I'm gonna go to the materials group and change it from inherited to bark this automatically applies to all the generators because they are all set on inherited now that the bark is assigned we can now edit the UV mapping of the trunk let's say if I want it smaller or if I want it bigger for this case let's make it bigger I'm gonna go to our UV mapping group section in the property bar and I'm gonna alter the you absolute if I go to zero you'll notice that the UV texture will get bigger but if I change it to two you'll notice that the amount of times it wraps increases but for this demo as I mentioned I want it smaller you can do this for all the branch generators in this case let's make them smaller okay time to add the leaves so I'm gonna go to my generation window right click go to add geometry and I'm gonna choose our branch leaves generator I'm using branch leaves because it computes a lot faster than leaf mesh generator the reason is because in leaf mesh it stores the data so you can note edit however in batch leaves it doesn't you will also notice that the default mesh created for the leaves is this flat plain so if you want to incorporate your own mesh you can import it or you can actually create your mesh inside this beet remodeler so now to add a leaf material I'm gonna go to the plus/minus icon and select add new I'm going to rename this leaf press ok I'm gonna select my leaf material it's gonna load I say ok and I'm gonna decrease the gloss a little bit to apply the material I'm gonna go to the Lee's group in our property bar and change it from none to leaf material so your notice that in our leaves there seems to be these areas where the texture isn't applied that is because 2-sided isn't enabled in the leaf material once you enable two-sided it applies the material to both sides of the mesh you can see I increased amount of leaves so now I'm going to add a mesh to the leaves I can do this by going to the leaf material in the material tab and then selecting this edit button right here as you can see an edit cut out window will appear this basically allows me to cut out a mesh in the material that I selected edit in I'm now going to cut out a mesh to the leaf material and you will notice I'm gonna be making three meshes a high medium and low that is because we have high medium and low resolutions so right here in the tool bar so when I assign these meshes and I change the resolutions the meshes will automatically change with the resolution and it will decrease or increase the triangle count so that way I basically have three different triangle count trees created let me just finish this low echo here our leaves on a tree you can see the mesh is automatically applied it's not those planes I'm going to now focus on their branch so we can see the leaf structure better it's kind of chaotic so I select the branch and I'm gonna go to the eyeball icon in the toolbar I'm gonna select it and I'm gonna say focus as you can see here's our branch and that's isolated now I'm going to alter the shape of the leaves I go to local orientation I'm adjusting alignment so it pushes the leaves closer together then I'm going to go to the green curve and I'm gonna push the left-hand side down a little bit that way at top the leaves are closed and towards the back of the twig the leaves are further apart next I'm gonna add some shape to the leaves I'm gonna have some fold your nose it folds a curl I'm going to adjust the green curve so it curves in one direction towards the tip and then another direction towards the bottom we're gonna add a small twist value and then the plus and minus is variants I'm going to add a variance on all the leaves that way it breaks up the repetitiveness I usually tend to keep it around point one to point two let's just add them okay so here's our tree with the leaves I'm gonna unfocus now so I go to the eyeball icon and I say clear focus or I hit control F okay here's our tree I'm now gonna reset the camera now that's all setup I'm gonna apply when I want to go to tools and our menu bar and I'm gonna click win wizard it basically sets the controls for you you can choose from the different templates I'm going to choose ornamental cultivated tree I'm gonna say okay as you can see the trees moving in the wind now let's say you didn't like something about the tree movement you can click on the fan icon let's say the trunk the trunk seems to move a lot in this tree I'm gonna go to my settings and I'm actually gonna alter the shared parameters the shared is applied to the whole tree you notice trunk doesn't have one enabled so I'm just gonna decrease these parameters so the trunk doesn't move as much okay and you see we have four levels of wind those correspond with the levels applied to the branches one two three four and if you want to alter the leaf movement you will go to the leaf motion you can alter the bend the frequency the flutter or the leaf so you have a lot of options I'm going to disable the wind now here's our tree it's basically done the last thing I'll do is apply ambient occlusion I go to the post group and I'm going to select the three ball icon this computes the AO and if I don't like it I want to adjust it I just select the light icon and then I go to the ambient occlusion group right here that is it for a video I hope this gives you a better understanding of the modeler and it's tools you can find more information in our documentation and you can find more tutorials on our YouTube page

Channel: SpeedTree

Views: 117,257

Keywords: SpeedTree, Modeling, 3D, Computer Graphics, Cinema 8, SpeedTree Cinema, Tree Modeling, Procedural

Id: tyeEQtlkP6g

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 24 2017