Tree modelling

Another environment prop I wanted to do was the trees for the first level. I started like most of the props with a cube mesh. I made a loop cut trough the middle and scaled the faces.

this was the bottom of my tree from which I started extruding the base and the branches. I extruded until the middle from where I started extruding the individual branches, from which I made smaller branches… I was also making loop cuts in existing branches and kept extruding, scaling and moving.

Once the trunk and branches were done, I started creating the leaf. I added a new plane and after many loop cuts and vector editing, I ended up with a relatively acceptable leaf.

I added a a bit of thickness to it and then duplicated it four times. I then connected the five leaves and made them one object.

I then moved to creating a vertex group from the tree branches where the leaves are going to attach. I selected the vertices I wanted and then went in to weight paint mode to tweak it more. I then added a new particle system to the tree mesh and changed the particle type to hair. I changed the render mode to object and added the leaves object I created before. This way I replaced the particles with the leaves. I added the branch vertex group to the density vertex groups and increased the number of leaves to 300. I also changed other settings like the rotation length and randomness. I played with the particle settings for a while until I got the result I wanted. After that I went in the modifier’s tab and applied the particle system. This made all of the leaves in. individual objects. I made new vertex groups. One from the leaves and one from the tree itself. This way I can manipulate them individually (texture them) even after I make them one mesh. I then selected all of the leaves and the trunk and joined them together. After that I applied some image textures to the from the source I used before, edited the UVs and reduced the noise of the trunk texture.