ZBrushCentral

ZBrush Trees

ZBrush Artworks
#1

Some of you may have recently seen my image of ZChurch. I wonder if anyone has any ideas on the best way of modelling realistic looking trees. My background trees were fairly easy and I could put clumps on the end of the branches to give the impression of groups of leaves. For the foreground trees I used a texture that I had made up, of separate leaves spread across a black background which I then used on a sphere, using the transparency facility in the texture palette. The end result being that only the leaves were visible. I then took this to my tree trunks, punched and stretched it about and got a reasonable look of separate leaves and depth. This is still not perfect and I wonder if anyone has any better ideas.

Thanks for reading this message.
Dave

#2

funny, dec 1st seems to have been a tree-day: Ed-the-Atom let us have another peek over his shoulder allowing us to watch the creation of a magic forest, Davey added new levels to WingedOne’s zooooper fractal-tree-script, you came up with an explanation of how you achieved that :+1: :+1: :+1: trees in ZChurch, Dave and even i set out to do something treelike without knowing of these developments :slight_smile:

nothing special, i know, but just to celebrate “coincidences” i thought i’ll upload it anyway :smiley: i was using WingedOne’s :+1: :+1: :+1: script (clearing the canvas and going on with the MultiMarkerTool, placing ever tinier tools above the others). i think a better way would have been to save the branchtool as a polymesh and editing it (and by saving a few edited versions get a wider and less geometrically looking variety of branch-sets).

as for the leaves, i think another neato way would be to create a kind of leave-tool and apply it to the tree-top at small drawsize with another stroketype than drag-rectangle (freehand, for instance), so a multitude of leaves is created along the branches with each stroke.

for some more ideas on botanics (fiberbrush!!!) you might want to have a look at aurick’s classic Vegetation Tutorial :smiley:

  • juandel

edit:
here is another fantastic thread with insights of Kaz…

and lets not forget about impending’s great insights and those of aurick (thank you for bringing this up, Doc! :D)

#3

hi dm im not really good at trees just yet,but i did a project awhile back that needed a fallen tree chunk, i created the truck by using the cylinder 3d tool setting the radious in symentry panel i was able to come up with the image below, i then took the entire image into photoshop and did my fine detail on it… at that time we didnt have the texturing scrip by pix… hope this helps… by looking at this image you will see that its kinda like the image you can create with the picnic script that comes with zbrush 1.23b…and as far as creating a leaf tool well… i can give you the basics but aurick did a tut on it awhile back… he scanned a left… took that image into photoshop,changed it into a alpha,…imported into zbrush applied that to a plane 3d and deleted the areas he didnt want,and after all of that he imported his leaf image and applied it to the leaf tool… and wala you have a new tool and a real texture to go with it…

#4

Thanks Juandel and doc for the useful information, I think amongst these ideas there will probably be a better method than mine. The failure of my approach is that the leaves tend to all be at the same angle, which obviously isn’t natural. The other problem is they are too dense, if I put fewer leaves in the texture the branches are too visible and some leaves are floating in the air. Thanks for the images, your tree is very effective Juandel, and your scene doc is very photographic it must have taken some work, excellent.

Dave.