Welcome to using sapling to make a basic tree.
In this video you will look at the tree presets see how to add leaves to your tree and sapling.
Learn where The leaves are actually placed on the tree and how to get it looking more like a real tree
at the base.
So just as an example here we've got is not got any materials on it it's just a plain material there.
But we can see that very rarely would trees into the ground if you look at the base of the tree here
like that they would more enter the ground something along these lines.
And that's a far better looking base far more interesting as well.
So let's go explore that now and hop on over into a blender.
So we've made a lovely bush with a couple of flowers on it over in blender so far and we need to make
a tree now.
So let's go explore sapling a little further.
I'm going to move onto another layer.
I'm going to go on to led 10 this time I'm going to centre the 3D cursor.
Oh not with those keys we're shift an S and cursor to centre.
And let's go ahead and add ourselves a curve and add a tree.
Now again I'm going to make this tree a lot shorter.
I'm going to untop all lock camera to view as well and try and give myself a bit more space on my low
resolution screen here.
Okay I'm going to turn bevel on so I can see it was going on.
I'm also going to turn up the bevell resolution because this is going to be a large object if if that's
too low.
It's going to look very blocky.
I'm going to lower the scale down to maybe five or so so I can see it as not too big in the scene it
doesn't need to be too big either.
Now further down here there's actually a load preset a button so if you make a tree and you'd like the
look of it you can always reload the preset at any time.
And on here there's a couple of options already here have already saved one in fact called starting
tree.
But I really like these see a black coaker been playing with them all.
And I really like the way that comes out and again we're going to just have to all wouldn't want a resolution
of 80.
I'm going to go for six in this case that should give us a bit of smoothness as you can see it's still
quite a big tree so let's lower the scale down.
Let's take it down to five or so.
That's looking pretty good.
In fact I'm still in Cannes review that's come out of Own i'll be able to zoom out and look around.
Okay so that is looking pretty good for the moment.
Now to add leaves to this tree we'd need to hop over to as you probably guess the leaf settings and
schematic on show leaves and what this is going to do is it's going to add 25 leaves to the end of each
of the branches.
Now we've only got a couple of branches coming out of here so if we go back to the branch growth setting
up I do apologize the branch splitting section section is on this second level that the leaves appear
so until it's on that second level there won't be any leaves at all.
So one way to boost this and get leaves all over the entire tree will be to increase the levels here
to number three.
But let's before we do that just check the numbers here.
So we've got 40 branches each with 120 branches coming out where K and each one of those hundred and
twenty is going to have twenty five leaves on it.
So I'm anticipating it's a stop blender working for a few months while I do this and your computer may
take a little longer but if so then lower these figures though ago it took a few seconds to do.
We could see straightaway we've got some leaves on our tree and I really like the way that this one
is dropping down towards the ground as well.
I can use that to my advantage right.
Let's deal now with how this looks at the very bottom I'm going to get rid of this render board as well.
I'm finding it a bit distracting.
So down here this comes to a complete sort of dead stop straying to the ground.
We want that to happen we want to have a more natural.
So the first thing we're going to have to do is this is still a curve object so just like you've done
to your bush beforehand on the tree we're going to go out and see and we're going to make a mesh from
the curved data.
Not going to keep the original.
I'm quite happy that we are going to lose that data and now we've done that we can actually go in to
sculpt mode then there's loads of ways of doing this but obviously in sculped mode we can start doing
a bit of alteration if we hop into edit mode before we do that.
You see there's not much geometry down here which means that the standard sculpting is not going to
be that well.
Isn't going to be that precise.
In fact it's just going to move a couple of earths is round so we're going to have to turn on as we've
done before.
We're going to have to turn on the dynamic topology which is going to create more space more geometry
for us as we go nave.
Going to have to be careful as well because you may end up adding too much detail to your tree.
Now down at the bottom here.
Oh that's subtract some disconnect.
Literally go ahead and start adding some detail making a bit bulkier at the bottom.
Excellent.
And we can try something like the snake hook here make it a bit smaller and see if we can pull outs
and then zoom in for this one so I can pull out a bit more or I've got mirroring turned on you can see
how all it's just.
It's 10 at the radius just a little so we can grab some more.
There we go that's starting to look a bit better more like a root system coming out of the tree.
I've got mirroring turned on but that's not too much of a big deal at this point in time.
And now around here were the branches actually are.
It may pay us a little bit to make that look just a little bit more blended around there.
So that when we're looking at the tree later on it doesn't look like these branches are just literally
stuck on.
Now it only matters with the low down ones because I'm probably only going to be seeing that but making
them a little more blended in.
It's going to help massively.
Now obviously be careful how much detail you add cause it will.
Look if you zoom out too far that will happen.
Remember the distance you zoom out will depend on the level of detail of dynamic topology works every
zoom right in.
You can add a little knot in there.
And if we zoom all the way out if we try and do the same thing it wrecks the tree completely.
So there's lots to play about here a lot to do to make this tree look a bit better than just a plain
old stick in the ground.
And of course with that in mind I got a challenge for you guys.
I would like you to finish your scene.
So create a tree for the scene and give the tree and leaves a material.
Make any changes to your scene that you deem necessary.
Remember to keep your samples low whilst prototyping and moving things about and then render your final
scene and share with us.
In the discussions I really do like seeing what you guys have created.
I'm looking forward to seeing this scene all coming together.
Remember to keep those samples low I can't stress that enough.
Don't be waiting around ages just to see if something is in the right position.
Keep them low.
Prototype rapidly go backwards and forwards.
Try it out and then finally turn up the samples for that final scene.
Don't go crazy with it.
We don't need it super high rez or millions and millions of samples.
Just get it to a decent enough quality so you can share with us all your creation.
Pause a video now and give that a go.
Okay guys.
Welcome back.
Let's hop over and finish our scene in blender.
Right so let's go ahead and have a look at how this is currently looking.
Well first of all I can see before doing anything else.
I know we haven't assigned any material of some going to do that.
First of all so we've got the tree nested under the tree.
We have our leaves.
So if I go to the tree first anger to the material tab I'm just going to add a very basic material and
I'm going to call its branches or chinari or word or something along those lines of them to call it
a tree.
And I'm going to change that colour to a all not an orange but I suppose it could be but a darker brown
case something along those lines.
If you go out and look at trees they're not necessarily dark brown.
They may be whites and with bits on them.
But we are not going to detail it with texture at the moment and the leaves well what colour leaves
do we want do we want an autumn leaf do we want a bright summer leaf.
Well I'm doing a midsummer's day in this one so let's call the material leaves.
Is there going to be green.
I'm going to leave it as a diffuse colour but I'm certainly not going to have them.
That's bright and leave it around there.
Of course I can play with the materials and build up a bit speculatory in there as well to give to the
leaves a bit of a shine.
And let's have a look at the tree as a whole that looks pretty good.
Now let's start bringing other things into our scene some going to go to my layer's tab here.
And on the layers management and just see how it looks with the Cameron lighting turned on that's important
and the grass layer.
So my tree itself I want to shift up to the top here so I'm just going to grab it all.
The whole thing had to grab the whole thing and move it.
Well I will grab the right thing in a moment.
There we go grab the tree.
I'm still in sculpt mode.
That's why switch over to object mode and I'm going to move that.
First of all just to cross.
So it's roughly in the right place and I'm going to have to lift it up on the z axis itself until it's
just coming through the ground.
Let's switch Becca over to material mode and have a closer look at it.
Of course I could go in in detail things.
Now importantly if I'm viewing it from the camera so let's just go to the camera view itself.
Well if that's the camera view the trees not even in the scene so we're going to have to adjust things
so that everything's in the scene itself.
So let's go ahead and add the rabbits.
Excellent.
I seem to have a tree layer here is that my Bush whereas my bush situated in this scenes that's situated
about there.
So let's go ahead and move the camera around now.
Lock for camera to view and just rotates.
Well it's getting a bit busy.
Give myself a bit more space as well to see what's going on.
Pull that up.
Now this is all artistic licence at this point.
You can go through as many iterations as you like.
I quite like that for you.
There I think so.
I've done a test that really quickly got a low sample rate.
That's good.
Let's just render that out and see how it looks now I've got all my layers turned on yet either and
I don't need to only see what the whole thing looks like right at this very moment.
I just need to look at the general composition.
Well looking at it quite like this tree to be a bit bigger actually and I'm going to try to scaling
it up because I can't see the top half.
It doesn't really matter what it does to the top half.
In this particular case let's hop back into the 3D view and select our tree which is still there and
just scale it up.
And it's looking better.
I'm going to bring that down.
Back into the ground.
Tell that little bit on the left goes in as well.
Well I'm going to leave for up here probably at the scene.
Right.
That's looking a bit better in the trees more prominent in the scene.
I'm going to render it again and going through this constant iteration cycle What's it going to look
like.
What's it going to look like.
That's very important.
And keeping those samples low.
Okay.
So it looks like the roots going to the ground.
I'm going to go into my model now and just edit it in and bring this actually down into the ground.
So I'm going to let you grab the virtex on the end make sure in proportional editing mode and pull it
down until it goes into the ground.
Going to make that just a little small or so arches up.
Excellent.
I am liking that.
Now let's go ahead and hop into object mode and scale the tree up again ever so slightly.
Right.
Brilliant.
Let's see now how this looks with the other layers.
All turned on.
So every layer turned on I can see down at the bottom and on the tool shelf as well.
And the layer management Everything's turned on.
Let's do a very quick render and see how that looks now because this has got all of the extra grass
in it.
It is likely to take significantly longer.
No it doesn't have all the other grass in it why doesn't have all the grass and it's probably cause
the particle systems are turned off at the moment.
So the particle systems are part of the ground so I need to find my ground plane.
There it is.
I'm going to go for particle systems.
And here we are they're actually turned off at the moment.
So I'm going to turn them all on in the rendered view which is this camera and go and render that only
at five samples again because I want to see what it's coming together like.
Now we can see there straightaway it's taking significantly longer because there's far more detail in
the scene that blender needs to calculate.
However underneath this run out now and see how it looks.
And remember this is only five samples it looks like it's going to take approximately three or four
minutes to do so are join you again.
And fast forward to when it's done.
Wow okay so this is looking really good.
I'm happy with its current arrangements.
I could critique a few things in here but notice now that the grass is in place one of the great things
about the grass is it's covering up the base of the tree a little more which is great because it just
covers up the little bits of detail that we haven't added.
That's really good.
I'm going to leave this now rendering a higher definition higher sample rate just to get a bit of a
clearer image.
How did you guys get on.
I'm really looking forward to seeing what you have come up with how you've placed your tree what tree
did you go for.
What colour is rabbit etc.
I am really looking forward to seeing these so make sure you share them in the discussions.
And as always I will see you in the next lecture.