TreeSketch 2

[Nacy Nightfire]

Ahem!   As if you don't have enough to do/learn/create.

An extremely addicting and useful IPad App is TreeSketch2.  It exports as fbx and you can get a free FBX exporter from autodesk here:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?id=10775855&siteID=123112

 

Did I mention it's free?

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

To expand this suggestion: 

For the people who don't own one of these or simply don't want to use a pad for creating environmental parts and just love the raw power of their computers and 3D software:

Here a few good Plugins for Blender, regarding Tree generation:

- http://blenderthings.blogspot.dk/2013/02/a-new-tree-add-on.html

- http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?214857-Sapling-A-Tree-Generator-Add-On-for-Blender-(OSX-Fix-10-Aug-2011)

and some for the Maya people:

- http://xfrog.com/

- http://www.3dtutorialzone.com/tutorial?id=93

 - http://www.bionatics.com/

- http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_11_xstream/

The latter is also for the 3DS Max users.

 

Some of them are free, some of them are not. But they all do a great job =)  

[Anders Aljon]

Hi guys...

 

TreeSketch2 is a very nice app. However, i tried to import it to Maya, and it dosnt load the textures right(with doc the leaves dont get trasparent, and look more like white sheets of paper with a leaf painted on. With FBX lefs is all green. And if i export it to SL with the FBX-DAE format i get an error. 

Have anyone imported somthing to SL from Treesketch? And is, then how?

I would love to be able to do that

 

Anders

[Anders Aljon]

Hi again

I got the tree right in Maya loading the textures manually. Then i exported it as FBX_DAE and tred to import it to SL. I then get the following errors:

Error: Material of model is not a subset of reference model.

Then i´f itry to caluculate weights and fee i get the following error:

mesk model failed to upload: The model contains no meshes

Any suggestions on how to correct this?

 

Anders

 

[Anders Aljon]

anybody tried this ?

[Nacy Nightfire]

I don't have access to Maya, but I just made a simple tree (see photo taken in SL) and imported the obj file created by the program directly into Photoshop to take a quick look at it.  I then I re-exported it as a dae file from PS using the default settings and uploaded it directly to to SL.  On upload into SL I just accepted the lods created for me.  I didn't run into any upload issues.

One glitch was the texturing of the leavesI applied the leaf texture and it's not visible in SL.  All the leaf geometry is stacked properly and the normals are in the right direction, but it's not showing up.  Possibly I need to break the leaves up into a few material groups, I'm not sure.  It all looks fine when I import it into Blender as an obj.  

I don't like the UV set up for the trunk, but it's no problem to redo those.  The program includes a nice bark texture, normal map and leaf image.

 

Edited to add:  This photo is taken prior to adding textures. When I add the leaf texture the leave area is just alpha/invisible.

 

 

 

Edited a second time to add:

 

Below is a quick and sloppy render in Blender. Right off the bat the textures were visible on the mesh in Blender, but they wouldn't render.   I found I had to dump the materials and add them again to make it render correctly in Blender.  I'm not exactly sure why they weren't functioning, but it was easier just to dump them and start fresh.

I know this isn't especially  helpful when talking about using Maya.  I thnk the lesson here is it needs some tweaking, but it works.  Try the PS method if you have access to it.

 

Edited yet again (this might be some kind of record) to add:

 

 

I broke up the leaves into 5 separate, but identical material groups and now the image is showing up in SL as you can see.  This low detail tree is 22 li so clearly the best  use of the program is to create tree images that can be applied to simple planes rather then try to use the geometry as is.

[Anders Aljon]

Thank you Nancy, this helps me understand the problem. I will try to make some texture groups in Maya to see if that helps. Ill will also try photoshop, but i think beeing able to edit the trees in Maya (or Blender) will be a huge benefit. Im very curious on the prim count  in SL too, that might be the next challenge:)

 

Anders

[Nacy Nightfire]

I'm glad that was helpful.  I hadn't check the program for a while and was glad to see it's been updated with obj being an optional export format, among others.  I used the fbx converter when I first found out about the app, but now I don't have to bother with that.

RE: Reducing LI impact.  Perhaps switching to the method of using 6 intersecting planes just for  the medium and low LODs and applying full tree images to the lods/planes on those levels those might help with LOD.  I'm thinking since trees are pretty large you might do away with the Low LOD  by just make that geometry  a simple triangle.   And, of course, limit the physics shape to a simple box that fits the diameter of the trunk.  Unfortunately I don't have time to test this.