Tree Model
I’ve had to take the last two weeks or so off from working on LxEngine. Being a bit tired, I wasn’t quite ready to jump back into the coding, so decided to do a quick stub model in Blender 2.5 to add to the collection of LxEngine assets.
Here’s the resulting generic tree model:
Bezier curve mesh
The model is very simple and uses Bezier curves with depth. The basic idea was borrowed from the more complex tutorial “How to Create Stunning Trees” at Blender Guru, though the above model uses only one slice of the recommendations from the 30 minute tutorial.
The fundamental operations used were:
- Add Bezier curve
- Turn off Front & Back Caps
- Add a non-zero Bevel depth
- Set Resolution to 3
- Ctrl-click to add segments
- Alt-S to scale segment radii
- A to select multiple vertices and W to smooth radii of connected segments
- Select multiple segments and Shift-D to duplicate and create branches
Finally, the Beziers were converted to a mesh:
- Object mode, ALT-C
- Add Decimate Modifier
- Set ratio to about 10% the vertices
- Apply Modifier
- Set object shading to Smooth
Decimated mesh with 10% of the original vertices