Welcome to.
Introduction to a sapling in this video.
You'll turn on a sapling and on your learn the fundamentals of suppling understand to save before using
sapling and we'll see why and learn how to prevent blender from crashing when using sapling.
Let's go explore sapling now over in blender.
So the first thing that we need to go and do now is make sure that sapling is turned on.
So you'll find that under file user preferences and go to the add ons tab.
Now we can search for it.
In fact it's here add curve sapling we don't need to search for it.
I've already got it turned on.
If you haven't please put a tick in this box and save your user settings.
Excellent.
Now that saplings turned on we can go and explore with it.
So first of all so we don't muck around with our current blender file the bunny that we're working on.
Let's go explore the sapling add on in a brand new blender file.
Ill also make sure everything's nice and smooth for us and nothing else is slowing us down.
So I'm going to make sure I've saved my fluffy bunny and hop over into a brand new blender file.
Excellent.
So now that we're in a brand new blender far we can go ahead and add half first tree.
So first of all let's get rid of our cube.
Now the sapling add on itself is located under the curves so you can go add curve and add tree or shift
in a curve add tree and it will add a tree forus not quite there yet.
Let's go in and see what else we can do.
Okay solvay expanded the operation panel all the operator panel in the lower left hand corner here so
we can play with some of these settings.
Now when you're going to go into great detail at this point in the course regarding sapling but do have
a play about it's a wonderfully addictive tool for making some wonderful.
Trees and other plants as well.
So we're going to start on the Geometry tab and look at the branch splitting and branch growth.
We're not going to do the leaves or anything else for the moment we just go and deal with these three
sections and a very brief overview of them.
So geometry if we turn the bevel on we can see the the tree becomes three dimensional which is a great
stance and the bevell resolution determines how high.
How many faces this is going to happen at the moment.
Scott 4 I presume this is now 5 6 7 etc. but what you can see is as these increase the number of triangles
also goes up so the higher the resolution the tree the more efforts you are going to have to put into
rendering it as well as the curve resolution doesn't make a difference when it's on vector.
However when it's on auto.
This curve for a solution has a huge difference and it basically controls midspan up here with the curve
resolution set to 1.
You can see that these are really jagged.
But as we turn this up they get smoother and smoother.
But of course that adds more geometry as well.
Random seed will as it sounds.
It starts the tree off in different ways.
A great way of getting a good starting point.
In fact I quite like the one that one there kind of wiggles along as a great start ratio.
Well this is the ratio of the trunk size so that looks more like a dragon's tail or something outside
of World of Warcraft of days gone by.
To be quite honest I can't see that being a tree.
Could be some alien plant though.
Your imagination can run wild.
But that biloela not ever backed down.
Scale of the tree is how high it is solves.
You can make it a whopping great big tree or a tiny tree.
So I'm going to make it a bit smaller so just fits on the screen so we can see the whole tree scale
variation.
The variation in the tree scale so we can turn that up and down and it will make another difference
radius scale.
Well this is going to change the size of the trunk itself.
We want that back.
Here we go.
And the variation will change a variation on that.
So going onto the branch splitting this is where you need to be careful.
I can't stress enough that you will lock blender up at some point whilst playing with this.
So if you're working in a file before you play with sapling please save.
Otherwise there's a good chance that you'll get fed up waiting and will have to quit the program and
start again.
So levels here now these levels going from one to three and will for lock up my computer it might do
be a great example of how not to look at your computer.
Okay I am able to go for in general you probably don't need to go any more than 3 so I'm going to leave
it on too for the moment so we can see what's going on now branches at the moment.
Zero is absolutely fine here.
If we turn this up it's not going to do anything at this moment in time.
The next one means off this main trunk.
There are now 50 branches on the third layer down so 1 2 3 where it's 30.
It means for every every one of these 50 there are 30.
And finally the four effort every one of those attached to those attached to those there's going to
be 10.
Now you can see very quickly cause these are multiplied up you only need to change one of the lower
figures to have a huge impact further down the line.
And that's one of those things that all cost you dearly.
If you go too high.
And trust me I've done it accidentally.
You're just moving the figuring.
Just go to high and the system decides to it's not crashing it's just going to take ages to calculate
the new geometry segment splits are very similar to branches.
Ever let's just lower these down so it limits my chance of crashing.
So we've got 10 branches that are producing 10 branches and that producing 10 branches.
So there we go.
We've got a series of branches coming in off there.
Now other segments splits.
They split the branches themselves but they don't alter these numbers here so if you split up some of
these branches Well it looks of it funky at the moment and I don't think were going to be able to count
them.
There's far too many of them now let's drop back down a couple of levels if and let's drop down to just
level two so we can see what's going on.
So we've got 10 branches coming off of here.
Well it looks it doesn't quite look ten branches but that's what it says.
We got ten branches coming off of here now.
If we splits.
This first level.
We still only have 10 branches coming off of it just splits the first level so is a great way of adding
detail without having to add a load more branches because you're just splitting branches that already
exist.
One of the useful things just go turn up the number here again so we can see more some more tree basically
is the base size and that determines where the actual branches start from at zero or close to zero.
Any way the branches themselves will they start towards the bottom of the tree so that there looks much
more like a Christmas type tree of fir tree.
And of course up the top here a couple of trees that look like that will not look like this.
A couple of ones are like this Acacia trees and things like that.
So there's a lots of different types of tree that you can emulate using this and I would encourage you
to play with the split tangles split angle variation and all of these things here and you'll soon see
that you can make your tree that was once facing up would droop down and have some really weird effects
carrying on with it there.
Okay let's move on to the final section here.
The branch growth.
Now this is where you can really change the dynamic of the tree and you can have a let's say a shorter
stump just here.
Now all of these are relative to the one above as well as very important to realize that point five
and point five.
Well that's half of it was before but point five and 1.
Both of these are now the same length and point five and 2 means that's the actual All these branches
are twice as long as the original stump itself.
Vertical attraction.
Well it simply changes their vertical attraction it literally all looks.
That is quite awesome.
Sorry I have not done that before.
That is quite alien.
It's hypnotic.
Okay that's basically pulls some vertically in a course when they go on over earthcare Looks like it
wraps it round again and then pulls and backup.
So very cool.
And again we've got lots of other things we can work on down here.
In general I don't bother changing the curve for a solution but as you saw earlier it changes the detail
level of the curves and it can actually change the appearance of the tree quite dramatically.
So do play with these sections here and there are a couple of things I want to show you now that you
can actually make.
I have made two things I've made a tree and I've made a little bush wood flowers.
Just to show you how versatile sapling can be.
So here we have the little bush that I have made with some green leaves on it.
I modelled these leaves very quickly using a plain and subdividing it and colouring it in green essentially
and the flowers were there in the nature pack.
I basically just attach them to the vertices at the end of sapling once it was made and of course saplings
more known for its ability to generate a tree.
And here we have a tree in some grass land so you can see the power of it.
And now I've got a challenge for you guys.
I would like you to create a flowering bush so you sapling to create a bush like plants create a basically
leaf to use on our bush convert the sapling curve into a mesh objects using weight painting and virtex
groups to add flowers to the tips and leaves to the bush.
Then we're going to use geometry to make the flowers 3-d.
We're going to make sure that all of your objects have an appropriate material assigned to them.
And just a reminder to save before making any changing in sapling to prevent the loss of data.
Just in case you make one change and it causes blender to crash.
So go ahead and plan out the bush.
You're going to make have an idea in your head of what it's going to look like as well.
And now pause the video and give that a go.
Okay guys welcome back.
Let's go create a flowering bush over in blender.
Okay so I've hopped straight on over into my fluffy bunny and I'm going to create a new layer here.
I'm going to create my bush on.
So let's go ahead and add the sapling and it looks like my cursor was just a little bit away and I'm
just gonna move the lock camera off.
Now I've got just about eight minutes to make this in this video.
So wish me luck.
I'm going to add a level to it and make it a much smaller tree.
About one in height.
Perfect.
Right.
Or in fact it's going to be a Bush.
So let's go and do some branch growth.
Let's yeah the first one one.
The second one point nine.
Excellent.
Now there's too many branches there so let's come back to splits.
Let's reduce that a little.
That's good.
Base size this drop it down just a little.
So it's nice and spread out.
That is looking pretty good.
Okay.
So there's lots of different ways you can go about doing this.
I don't want to make it too complicated and that's probably going to be complicated enough actually
so I'm going to stick with that.
I'm going to shorten the arm length just a little.
Let's go to branch growth.
Let's bring that one down.
And this one up slightly.
Excellent.
So now we've got vose there.
I'm going to keep that as my base because I'm quite happy with that.
So let's go ahead and convert that so that's good.
Find it in here we've got our tree under a rename that bush to be consistent.
And I'm going to convert that to a mesh object.
Brilliant.
I'm going to give that mesh object to material.
I'm going to call it Bach and I'm going to set that Bach colour just to if diff use so dark brown so
stands out.
Okay we need to go ahead and create our flower and our leaf.
Now I'm going to create those on another layer.
So first of all let's create the leaf so I'm going to do that as a very basic leaf.
I'm going to get myself a plane here and I'm going to subdivide it a couple of times so I got some geometry
to work with.
Now they're subdivided it.
I'm going to make sure I'm in proportional editing mode.
It's you're going to start grabbing bits and pulling them about to try and create a general leaf shape
give or take.
Hey there's there is Travis way.
Okay.
There we go.
So in point happy with that.
That rough shape.
I'm just going to twist the leaf ever so slightly to give it a bit more of a dynamic feel.
There we go.
So we've got a leaf there.
Perfect.
A final thing I'm going to do on here's a primer add a subsurface division modifier just to smooth the
leaf out.
And I'm going to place the origin on the end of the leaf.
Otherwise it will stick in the middle of our branches when we try and put it on origins of 3-d cursor.
Perfect.
So that's that one done is a huge leaf but we can deal with that in a bit.
Now we need to bring in enough flour so let's add a mesh image as planes go find a flower now which
one shall I pick.
I am going to pick.
I'm going to pick this blue one.
I do like it's and I'm going to use the alpha channel because I've set up that already diffused and
transparent import.
Excellent.
Let's just focus on that particular.
There we go.
Let's go into edit mode and subdivide that twice.
And that's going to give us some extra geometry on that plane which should allow us to just pull this
down.
With proportional editing again turned on and make ourselves a bit more of a 3-d flower.
Now on it's a have a trumpet that's too big.
That's perfect.
And finally under the move 3D cursor to select it will shift an S and then I'm going to hop into object
mode and set the origin to the 3D cursor.
So again the flowers are mounted on the right points.
Now we've got all that we just need to assign ourselves our virtex groups.
So let's hop into edit mode on this Bush and the object a tour over here.
This add a vertex group called flowers and hop into edit mode with the Bush selected.
I'm going to make sure that I've not got any duplicate vertices going on there by removing doubles.
Yes.
Fifty one of them were removed some glad I gave it a go.
And I want flowers to basically appear on the end of all of these.
Now it looks like I've picked quite a few.
Of course it doesn't need to be every single one but me being me are I'm going to pick every single
one.
Anyway that looks good.
Add Virts group called flowers.
I'm sure I did that a moment ago.
I'm just going to assign those to them.
Right we're going to lock that group so I can't muck around with it.
We'll going to add one called leaves and that's basically going to be the rest of our model with the
flowers D selected.
Perfect.
And now let's go to the leaves click a sign and not lock it just yet.
I'm going to go into a weight paint mode and just remove.
We've got everything painted red there above the tips.
I'm just going to go in and scroll up here go to subtract and remove it from the very bottom because
I do not want leaves coming out of the bottom of the plant.
There we go.
That should be good.
I'm going to lock it.
Let's go into the particle effects and make sure that we are on the Bush we are.
I'm going to add a Flowers.
First of all Ann I'm going to add leaves as well.
So flowers is going to be a hair type.
And it's going to come from a scroll down here.
Density the flower sections all come from the ends.
I'm going to only have what 50 50 flowers coming on there will set the object to the blue flower.
Excellent.
Now I could play about with rotations but I don't feel I.
Time to do that.
I'm going to leave it as it is for the moment.
And then on here on the leaves again it's a tight pair.
Object is going to be our.
Or did a name it is.
It's probably still plain.
I can't score down there we go plain yet.
Those are the leaves are going to have to make them a little bit smaller or ashie that's worked out
quite well.
Now they're a bit too uniform across them actually going to turn on rendered mode to see what happens
and they've not got a material assigned to them so let's go assign the material.
Of course you can probably guess what I'm going to do.
I'm going to assign it a green.
That's a little bit darker.
And there we go.
And I think all we need to do to this.
Have we got any children assigned.
Let's go back to the bush scroll down here.
No we haven't got any children assigned us so we can't apply any randomness.
So I'm going to drop this down to about 200.
Well outlook's much better straightaway than a proper people children on and change the randomness of
the end points.
Twist and round ever so slightly.
We don't want to do that.
That's looking pretty good.
Let's see how that looks in context by switching on the ground plane as well.
So in layers layer management can't see to do grass.
That's the other one.
There we go.
So that's starting to look pretty good.
Let's render that out there that looks okay.
I could certainly work on it a bit longer to make it a bit neater but that's a good start.
How did you guys get on.
I'd love to see what foliage you came up with.
Please share yours in the discussion.
Even if you make a couple different varieties and I will see you guys in the next lecture.