3D Animation

A Tree as My Nemesis

November 20, 2008 The moment my client said the words “Make me a Tree,” I felt my stomach drop. The tree has always been the bane of my modeling. At CDIA, I spent days working on a tree for one of my first projects in which a car drove through a forest, and I had nightmares about those awful trees for months. A few weeks later, I made another stab at my model arch enemy – again, no success.  So, when my game designer client from “Wizard Wars” asked for the tree, I said the obvious.

“Of course!”

I was determined to overcome my fear of tree modeling.

So with about a year of pure modeling experience between me-now and me-then, I started looking around, got some good reference, put down my starting cube and away I went.

As with the house for “Wizard Wars,” the trees will be cover for the dueling wizards so will be facing a lot of destructive forces. Franklin, my client, had some specifics in mind: "It’ll have to snap off from the trunk. And the branches too – let’s have them snap off. And let’s say the wizards can rip it out of the ground eventually and fling the whole thing across the map. Yeah, that last part is a must.”

Two big things on my mind were the leaves and the UV’s for the tree model. For the leaves, I settled on using a bunch of intersecting planes with a pretty chaotic leaf texture. Not the fanciest of methods, but surely an acceptable, time-tested one. As for the UV’s, this was a “quick and dirty” job. You wouldn’t want to get too close to this texture; for testing purposes, I simply applied a single cylindrical mapping to the tree body and threw a tiling bark texture on. I showed it to Franklin as “placeholder UV’s and textures,” and he told me to stop just as it was. We decided that the game’s camera was usually far enough away from the trees that no one was going to be getting too close a look. We’d rather just have the asset done and in the game than look perfect. Of course, that’s just how it goes sometimes – I’d love to spend a week on the UV’s, but deadlines call.

In the end, I was extremely pleased with how the model came out, and I feel that I have finally put my fear of trees behind me. Additionally, the compromises I had to make reminded me of a lesson I’ve been learning for as long as I’ve been working with 3D: striving for perfection is not a realistic goal, but striving to constantly improve is a must.

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