Siyu Suen

Mixed with a few of your other trees, I think you'll have the start of a very real looking beech forest. Throw in some decaying logs and little bristly saplings and I'll have to cam around to make sure I'm not looking at a picture

__________________


"Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever" -Baron Munchausen

I'm attempting to bring about the end of the world to usher in a new era of mask wielding overlords. This is how!

Miriel Enfield

I'm continuing to tear the tree apart and rebuild it. Must! Be! Perfect!

I'm going to be using my old shop location (a quarter of the adjoining sim, Nouveau) for this.

Raindrop Drinkwater

I went on a long walk two days ago, and snapped a few pics with my phone. They are low quality.
I wasn't in a forest, just in the countryside. Most of the trees there are asymetrical, as they're bordering a river or touching each other.

As you have noticed, in a forest, trees tend to have long bare trunks; branches and leaves are gathered at the top. On the edge of a forest or a long a path, trees are more like in the countryside and grow on the sides, as they have more room to expand.

Sorry for the poor quality of the pics, I couldn't take a real camera.

Attached Images

	Image008.jpg (96.5 KB, 157 views)
	Image009.jpg (95.1 KB, 155 views)
	Image010.jpg (117.4 KB, 154 views)
	Image011.jpg (72.7 KB, 152 views)

__________________

Bunns

Lovely trees! I bet they are gorgeous in RL.

__________________
"The country needs to be rescued. It was abused by its previous owner." ~Wanda Sykes

Raindrop Drinkwater

They are! It's a wonderful stretch of countryside.

Bunns

I lived in the country most of my life, I love when everything starts blooming!

Miriel Enfield

It's fine. You didn't even have to do that much, and I'm thankful.

Raindrop Drinkwater

Miriel Enfield

I keep messing around and winding up with something that resembles my original beech.

I don't know. I'm tempted to junk these until we get meshes. I still don't like them. The branches look tacked on, the branch sculptie is doing that obnoxious rippling thing that sculpties do when you make narrow tubes out of them, and despite all the pictures, I'm still not quite sure if they look right or not, though I suspect they don't.

I should probably walk away from it yet again, before I start deleting things in yet another fit of pique.

Vlad Bjornson

SL trees are my nemesis. They are such complex objects in RL - and you can't really 'fake' it cuz everyone subconsciously knows what a tree should look like.

I have yet to make on that I am truly happy with. Even when I'm working on one that i think is OK, the more I look at it the worse it looks. Part of my problem is that I hate the flat alpha-trans leaves, so I am always looking for an alternate method to create the foliage. I'm also reluctant to use as many prims as some of the popular trees. Just can't justify 35 to 60 prims for a single tree.

Miriel Enfield

Yes, absolutely. I'm going to be looking into using sculpties for the foliage, which I'm sure will wind up being a disaster and an utter waste of time.

I'm still stuck on the trunk of this thing. The problem is that the big forks in the tree are contiguous with it, and you can't reflect that by jamming a branch sculpt into a trunk sculpt. The neat grid of vertices sculpties use, meanwhile, doesn't like being branched off like that.

Gah, if only we had meshes! I don't pretend that it would be a walk in the park -- I'd have to learn the ins and outs of UV mapping and real modeling in Blender (may it die in a fire) -- but it would ultimately be better than trying to use sculpties for something they're not designed for.

Hmm. *performs summon qarl ritual, scuttles over to mesh thread to ask when meshes might actually happen*

Vlad Bjornson

I have experimented with a couple of solutions for this. One was using multiple sculpties for different sections of the trunk and branches, which quickly eats up the prims. I've also tried using some tricky face folding on the sculpties to create non-contiguous shapes from a single sculpty. A great trick but it is a bit labor intensive and does reduce the actual number of faces that are visible in each sculpty.

Here's a video demonstrating a version of the technique I am refering to.
The ability to create different arrangements of the mesh is one of the main reasons I will be excited to see mesh import. Sculpties are awesome but the strict configuration of the grid is quite frustrating at times.

Miriel Enfield

Yes, I'm doing something like that for the fork in the branches. Unfortunately, it's a pretty limited technique, and introduces its own problems.

Raindrop Drinkwater

Nice tutorial, Vlad!

Miriel Enfield

Oh, fuck it. I give up. My branching sculptie is doing funny things and there's no way to fix it.

Thanks to everyone who commented anyway.

juro

We're sorry, your request is denied at this time.

Humps

Oh I am so with Juro .....u can't give up now. Your trees are simply lush (and they are not even completed yet). I came over to your Island for a nosey and you are very talented.

Now look into my eyes
watch my finger
you are feeling sleepy
you will finish the trees
you love the trees
you will teach humps all you know
you love the trees
and awake

Hope that helps

Miriel Enfield

Making Trees the Miriel Way: A Guide

1. Sculpt trunks and branches in Blender.
2. Put together finer branches in ngPlant.
3. Export ngPlant branches to Blender.
4. Spend four days messing around with leaf textures.
5. Render branches from ngPlant.
6. Realize your work is TERRIBLE, JUST TERRIBLE and delete it.
7. Repeat steps 1-6 until you are a babbling, incoherent mess.
8. ???
9. Profit!

Miriel Enfield

Okay, so I can't leave well enough alone.



That gray cube in the background is 40 x 40, for scale. I was in sculpted megaprim hell yesterday and most of today, and now I'm texture hell. Texture isn't tiling the way I expected it to, which is a big concern.

Though I might backtrack and opt to use the oblong sculpties. The tree would probably look better, and would use fewer prims -- not that it uses a whole lot right now -- but it'd be a total mess on viewers that don't support oblong sculpties. I'm very hesitant to sell something that will be pixel vomit on older viewers.

Does anyone know if Domino's script can handle oblong sculpties? I know there were some multires problems, but I don't really care about that.

Miriel Enfield

This is my WIP thread, and I'll fill it up with boring updates if I please. So there.

The tree in the above picture has been deleted. I've decided to use the new oblong sculpties for this. I'm not sure how wise a decision this is, since they'll look awful on the improper client, but:

1. The end result will look better and use way fewer prims.
2. Unless content creators eschew them, people are going to have to get used to these things eventually.

Unfortunately, I've hit another snag: my branch sculpts are fucked up in SL. I'm not sure if it's a bug in the sculptie scripts or just a limitation of the format, but polygons are winding up in places they shouldn't. Things that should be smooth are angular and uneven.

Gah. Can we get meshes already? Sculpties just aren't designed to handle this kind of thing, and the end result is problems like this.

Malachi

Where do you think plywood comes from?

Miriel Enfield

Why, it grows on trees, of course.

Miriel Enfield

IT LIVES!



For scale, that black smudge at the bottom is me. I'm not happy with how tall they are, but I'm not sure it's fixable. (Meter wise, I think they're okay, but I've said before that I don't think SL meters mean much.) If I scale them down, the trunks will get awfully small, and if I just shrink them along the z axis, the proportions will get messed up.

I'm pretty happy with them otherwise, though. 3 prims each (not including shadow prims, which I still have to put together), and alpha sorting problems are minimal. Now I just need to make a few more.

Vertigo Paris

Those looks great!!! Way to go!

__________________
SLU Clubhouse - Open 24/7
Vist at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tan/138/25/25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trout Recreant Helllllooooo Verti! At last! The chance to rate one of my favorite people! Absolutely beautiful pictures. You are a strong, opinionated woman who is not at all afraid to express herself both verbally and physically. You have a strong sense of fantasy and mystery surrounding a drop dead beauty. You maintain an aloof intelligent exterior that we long to break through, but which might intimidate some men. It shows a complexity of personality that few possess. Based on these pictures, I am giving you an 8.4 on the official Trout Recreant Scale of Slutiness. You are a slut, but only in the best possible way, and any man lucky enough to see that side of you should count his blessings.

Beebo Brink

Woohoo!!

__________________