****the true organics****
 

i am modeling trees. I need a LOT of help..Gimmie tips/links/advice....whatever suggestions you have put em here

PaintFX :D

-Emo

booooo hiss no!!! ;)

Stand up slowly from your computer (taking time to adjust to the lack of a mouse/keyboard).

Slowly walk towards the door. Open said door.

Walk outside and again take time to adjus tto your new surroundings.

Find a tree. Hug it.

Sketch said tree and any other near it.

Walk back towards your house/flat/room

Open door.

Sit back down in dark room and start modelling what you sketched

Failing that go to google and find some nice images and do the same thing.

Seriously though go to your local library and find some books about trees and see how they look in there and then try and re-create it

:)
Alan

I'm with Pure on this one. LOL

I'm not sure if I like your approach, since it involves leaving your computer for more than 10 meteres :). Try particle based trees for one, or sprite/poly sphere based... :D

In video games like The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and Halo, they usually use transparent images (probably targas) for the leaves and branches. The detail is all in the texture. The actual planes the leaves and limbs are placed on are usually no more than 2 or 3 faces. just do a few good ones, then start duplicating around a simple trunk model with a good bark texture and you've got it. Believe it or not, the tree trunks in Halo (the first level btw) are actually quite huge to help take up space to prevent the player from seeing through it too much, but they look very realistic. With Morrowind, the trees are much much bigger in size, so I believe they probably used bigger texture maps for those.

Anyway, if you have absolutely no idea what I'm saying, either ask me to explain with actual images or a self-writen tutorial or rent one of the two games and see for yourself. I consider this a good technique for thick trees like wintergreens.