Creating the Tree

Creating this tree…oh, where do i start. I had a love hate relationship with this damn tree. Hate, mainly because im still a beginner with maya and had no idea as to what i was doing and now have about 8 different tree’s, only one of which is actually usable in the film.

The first tree, i began using a tutorial i found on youtube wich was created using CV Curves, the problem with it was you had to duplicate the truck and resize it and then attach it multiple times for branches, however this wasn’t my problem, the problem was in this tutorial to add on leaves they wanted me to find an image on google and then cut it out to appear like leaves in photoshop and then bring it into maya, number one, this wouldn’t have been 3d and number 2, it would be a tedious task which would give me no rewards, it would look realistic and not like the clay style film we want.

Here is how it looked before i decided to call it quits with tree number one..

I created the next tree by placing a cube, rounding it by selecting 3 and then extrude upwards to create the trunk. I then used the ledge loop to make more edges so that i can bend, rotate, scale the faces to make a bent trunk, and then extrude out branches using the same, tedious process.

Here is how this looked

The next process i began, was yet again a huge mistake, i decided to create a sphere and flatten it, then create many small ones and child them to the large sphere. I would then duplicate this and attach many to the tree to create the look of leaves, however very quickly i was using thousands of polygons, maya was slowing to a halt and problems and crashes were occurring. I realised to work with this and render it would take time we don’t have and so gave up on this tree too.

Here is how it looked. It would have been lovely to use, but sadly it wasn’t possible.

For the tree that i and the rest of the group are actually happy with i did something similar to this, I reused the trunk and branches, and for the leaves i made a sphere and then parented small flattened spheres all around it, i then stuck them on in a very cartoony and circular manner, the render time is much shorter, maya works well with the tree and it matches the effect we hope our film to capture.

The next step was duplicating the tree as we will need a few in the background, we will also want different colour variations, such as autumn tree’s like this one, green tree’s, pink (cherry blossom) tree’s and even dead tree’s. Here is what i came up with…