Introduction - Part 3 - Palm Trees

One of the more challenging trees for me is the palm tree. It may take a few trys to get it just the way you want. You just have to be patient and keep working at it. In GR there's mainly 2 different palms, the tall ones and the short stubby ones. I think those short ones are called Angel palms. Once you create a palm leaf you can use it for either type of tree. For this tutorial I use the following textures from Island Thunder.

  c01_coconut.rsb   c01_palmtree.rsb

Create a Reference

Assuming you have 3dsm up and running, load the c01_palmtree.rsb and c01_coconut.rsb into the material editor. In the shader basic parameters rollout for the Palm tree texture, place a check in the box for 2 sided.

Create a plane in the top view to use as a reference like we did in the fir tutorial.   In 3dsm 4, press f3 to see the surface of the plane instead of the wire frame view. Give the newly created plane a name. I used the name "reference" on mine. For the size of the reference plane, 1m x 1m should be fine. Apply your palm tree texture to the plane. Save.

Does your reference look like this?

For me this is a small problem because I want to outline the palm leaf with a spline but have very little room on the left side. To fix this I'll apply an Unwrap UVW and then select all the uvws and shift the whole box to the left which will shift my texture to the right giving me a little more room to work.

And now we have a little more room to work with.

Vertices

This next part is very important. We're going to use a spline to outline our palm leaf and the number of vertices you create will determine the number of faces. It's very easy to create too many faces and you could easily wind up with a palm tree that has thousands of polys. We don't want that. It will bog down the game. We want to place our vertices strategically so that we have just enough to give us the bends we need and at the places we need them.

Here's an example of how it should look.

Try to position your verts just like this. This will allow us to make the bends we need. Give your spline a name like palm leaf for example. Save.

Editable Mesh

With the palm leaf spline selected, convert to editable mesh. It's good to have edged faces turned on during this next part. You can do that by right clicking over the area of the viewport that says "top" and selecting edged faces from the drop down menu. We now have to create edges wherever we want our leaf to bend. The first thing we need to do is cut a line right down the center going lengthwise. Do this by going into poly sub-object mode and clicking "cut" under the edit geometry rollout and then click your leaf right between the two verts at the bottom of the stem. Draw a line upwards to the top of your leaf and click right between the two verts at the top.

It should look like this now.

We need to do this a few more times but this time in the other direction. We want to create edges that connect the verts on the right with the verts on the left. For this you should use the 3d snap tool. After you turn it on, right click it to change the snap settings. We want to snap to vertices so place a check in the vertex box and uncheck any other settings under the snap tab. You should still be in poly sub-object mode with the cut button depressed. Cut lines across your leaf object connecting the verts on the right with the verts on the left.

It should look like this when you're done.

Don't forget the one at the top of the stem. When you're done, exit out of poly sub-object mode and save. You can shut off 3d snap.

Now would be a good time to go back and check your work. Press "Q" in 3dsm 4 to see how many faces you have. 16? If so, that's good. Go into sub-object mode and click on the vert button to check the number of verts you have. You should have 15.  Sometimes extra verts can be created by accident when cutting lines. I'm not sure what causes that to happen but if that has happened to you, you'll want to fix it. One way to get rid of extra verts is by selecting an out of place vert and one that is close by and then welding them. Afterwards you can move the vert into the correct position.

So now we have a palm leaf object with 16 faces. It's a nice low number. Our finished tree will have a low number of polys and won't take up a lot of resources.

We can hide our reference plane now. We're done with it. With your palm leaf selected, apply the palm tree texture to it. Next apply a UVW Map modifier and then apply an Unwrap UVW. Click on the edit button in the parameters rollout. We need to resize the outline of the leaf so that it fits over our leaf in the texture. Do this by using the horizontal and vertical scale buttons to scale the size down and use the move tool to position it over the leaf texture.

And now the textured palm leaf should look like this. Save.

Making the leaf is the hardest part. Once you get the leaf made, the rest is pretty easy. I think we're ready to start bending this baby.

Bending the baby

Apply an edit mesh modifier to your leaf object. Next apply an FFD Box Modifier and change the number of points by clicking the "Set Number of Points" button. Use Length: 8, Width: 3 and Height: 2. You should change views at this point. The perspective view works best for me but you should use whatever you feel works best for you. We want to view our leaf from the side. So find a view that works well, you may have to use arc rotate in order to get a good perspective from the side.

Initially you'll need a slight angle looking down from the top.

In the window to the right where it shows the modifier stack, click the little plus sign to the left of the ffd modifier to expand the view of the sub-objects and select the control points sub-object mode.

Now select all 8 control points on each side of the leaf.

They turn yellow when selected. Pull downwards on the Z axis using the move and select button. You may need to adjust your view from time to time to examine your work using arc rotate.

Something like the above picture is good. Now we need to move these selected control points towards the middle. You can do this one side at a time by deselecting  8 control points on one side and moving the selected control points towards the middle. Then deselecting them and selecting the other 8 control points and doing the same. An easier way is to keep all 8 control points on each side selected and clicking the select and non-uniform scale button. If your leaf is like mine, the X axis is the one that runs across the width of the leaf. That's the axis you want to non-uniform scale your control points on. Dragging the cursor one way will spread them apart further and moving the cursor the other way brings them closer together.

Try to position them at equal distances from the middle.

On this next part, you're going to have to use you're own judgment. Select control points in groups of 3 and pull downwards to give an arcing shape or a bending shape to your leaf. In most cases you'll want to select entire rows of control points. For example, in the picture below I've selected the 1st row of control points.

Sometimes you'll want to select 3 or 4 rows at a time. Take your time and make small adjustments. If the leaf pops out of shape, then simply undo the last move and try something else. What I like to do is grab the 1st row and pull them down a bit, then grab the 1st two rows and pull them down some. Then I'll jump over to the back where the stem is and select the last row and pull them down, then I'll select the last 2 rows and pull them down a little. Then you might select 1 or 2 rows in the middle and move them upwards.

Now this next picture shows that I selected the middle 2 rows and pulled upwards on them but the leaf didn't bend.

You can also see in the above picture that there's no edges in the middle of the leaf. The leaf will only bend where there are edges. So, if you need to your leaf to bend there, you'll need to go back to an earlier version of your leaf and add 2 more verts to each side of the leaf, and then cut a line across the leaf connecting the new verts. You'll also be adding about 8 more faces if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, for now, this leaf will work fine. We could've gotten by maybe with just 5 control points for the length. Save.

The Trunk

Deselect any control points that are still selected and exit out of sub-object mode. Apply an Edit Mesh modifier. Time to make a trunk for our palm tree.  

Make a cylinder and give it a name. I named mine Palm_trunk. Click on the modifier tab to change the number of sides to either 5 or 6. Height segments can be as many as you like but the more you use, the more polys your tree will have. I chose 5 segments for mine.

For the Height, I chose 1.5m.  I basically just look at the size of my leaf and try to make a trunk that looks proportionally right. In this case 1.5m for the height of the tree seems to look right for the leaf. You may want to make your's a little smaller or a little bigger. Same thing for the radius. The trunk on a palm tree seems to start out a bit fat and then gets skinny for most of the length of the tree but then widens out again towards the top. So I'll start with making my radius a bit on the small size.

For my trunk, it looks like a radius of anywhere from .02m to .03m will be fine. I chose .025m. If you know that you want your trunk to be a certain height like for example you already know you want your trunk to be 3m high, then you can just make it that height and resize your leaf so that it looks to be proportionally right for your trunk. You can  apply an xform modifier to the leaf and then scale it bigger. Save.

Convert your Trunk to an Editable Mesh. This next part is up to you. You don't have to do it if you don't want to. I like to select the verts and move them around a little. It's not that important. By moving them around, you can control the size of each height section. It just gives your tree a little different look when you go to make either the top or bottom section a little fatter. I want my top and bottom sections to be short and fat, not long and fat, so I make those sections shorter by moving the verts towards either the top or bottom. To select a row of verts, go into the sub-object mode of your editable mesh by clicking the little plus sign to the left of it and select vertex, or , in the selection rollout just click the vertex button.

Now select the row of verts 2nd from the top.

Use the select and move button to move them higher on the Z axis. Roughly halfway towards the top is good. Deselect the verts and select the row of verts 2nd from the bottom and move them halfway towards the bottom.

Again, it's up to you whether or not to move any other rows of verts. I'm going to move my middle 2 rows apart some. An easy way to move both at the same time is to select both rows an then click the select and non-uniform scale button. This will allow you to move them both in opposite directions simultaneously. Make sure you select the Z plane so you can move them up and down. Here I moved them apart a little.

Exit out of sub-object mode. Save. Now we can make the tree a little fatter near the top and bottom. Using Poly sub-object mode this time, select the polys of the bottom section of your trunk and use the Select and Non-Uniform button to scale the trunk fatter on the XY axis. You'll have to use your own judgment on how fat to make the trunk. Just do whatever looks good to you. Do the same to the top section as well.

Here's how mine came out.

I'm not real happy with those sections that are 2nd from the top and bottom. I'm going to re-adjust my 2 middle rows of verts closer to the top and bottom so that more of my trunk in the middle is skinny.

I like this a little better. Thinking ahead though, if I want to give my palm trunk a bend in the middle, I won't be able to do it because I don't have a row of verts in the middle. Grrr... sometimes it pays to do a little more planning in the beginning. But, there's a simple solution to this problem. Go into Poly sub-object mode and select all the polys of the middle section of the trunk. Click the Slice Plane button under Edit Geometry.

See that yellow plane? When you click the Slice button you'll be slicing your polys on that yellow plane. You can kinda think of it as a big knife. So here I clicked the Slice button and eureka! My middle section has been divided in half.

Exit poly sub-object mode. Save.

There's a couple more things to be done to this trunk. We need to texture it, and we need to bend it. Well, we could just leave it straight, but, I like making them bend a bit. It will be a bit more difficult to apply mapping coordinates after it's been bent so let's do the mapping and texturing first.

This time we're going to only texture part of the trunk with the trunk texture, and the small section at the top will be textured using the coconut texture. This might not be the best way to do this or even the right way to do this, but for me it works ok.

The palms in the stock maps have the coconut textures applied to what looks like a separate object near the top of the tree. I'm not sure if that's what they did or if they just altered the trunk by scaling some polys larger near the top. It's up to you how you want to do it. You could even place some small spheres near the top with the coconut texture making it look like real coconuts. In order to texture the tree with 2 different textures, we have to select the polys we want to apply a texture to and then apply the texture followed by the UVW map modifier and an Unwrap UVW modifier. So select your trunk, go into poly sub-object mode and select all the polys except for the the polys in the top most section of the trunk. Once they're selected, apply your palm tree texture to them and then apply a UVW map. Use Cylindrical mapping. Next apply an Unwrap UVW. Click the edit button to adjust the UVWs. Select all the UVWs and use the horizontal scale button to scale them smaller. Use the move button to position them over the trunk texture. Make sure all the uvw's are on the trunk texture.

Should look like this

Once you have it, close the window and apply an edit mesh to the trunk. Go back into poly sub-object mode and select all the polys of the top section of the trunk. Don't forget the cap which is the top face. Apply your coconut texture to the selected polys. Apply a UVW map modifier and use Box mapping. It should look fine without using an unwrap Uvw. Now apply an edit mesh. Apply a Bend modifier and give it a bend by changing the amount of the angle. I used -12 for the angle on mine.

I just stuck the palm leaf up there to give some perspective. Apply an edit mesh and Save.

Leaves

This next part will take some time to do. Using the leaf we have, we'll clone it to make lots of leaves and then arrange them around the top of the trunk. But, before we do that, it might be easier if we move our leaf's gizmo/pivot point. Select the palm leaf and zoom in on it using zoom extents all.

Looking at it from the side in your perspective view might be a good angle. Click on the Hierarchy tab, make sure the pivot button is depressed and click the "Affect Pivot Only" button. Click the select & move button. Adjust the gizmo so that it's lined up with the very tip of the stem. Use the arc rotate button to view the leaf from different angles to make sure you have it lined up as close as possible.

Once you feel you have it, click the "Affect Pivot Only" button once again to turn it off. Now use the align tool/button to align the pivot of your leaf with center of the trunk on the xy axis and maximum of the z axis. This is just meant to put you in the ball park. You may have to make some manual adjustments to it to get it centered properly. We want the end of the leaf's stem to be in the center of the trunk and near the top. Something like the picture below is good.. it doesn't have to be perfect, you'll be making more adjustments as you go.

What I do to make copies is press and hold the shift key while rotating the leaf a short distance on the z axis. Then I'll enter in a number like 5 or 6. I'll do 2 levels of leaves like this but with different angles. Then a couple leaves pointing upwards. Here's an example of how I start out.

So here I entered 7 for the number of copies.

And here is what I got. As you can see, these leaves are all going to need to be adjusted. I'll space them out more and get the tips of the stems lined up with the center of the trunk. And the next picture shows my tree after adjusting the leaves. I actually moved the tips of the stems past the center of the trunk to shorten the amount of stem that shows. The reason I did this is because in game when there's a long stem it tends to make the tree look less full.

Ok, now we need to add another layer of leaves. An easy way to do it is to just select all the leaves and then hold down shift and drag down on the z axis a small distance. You can even rotate them on the z axis a bit afterwards. Doing that will fill in the holes between leaves a bit. Only thing is the new layer of leaves has the same angle. I don't know any way of changing the angles other than adjusting them one by one. It's tedious but worth it in the end I think. Here's my palm tree after spending some time adjusting the angles of the leaves. I also went back to the 1st level and made the angles of the leaves a bit more random.

Now it looks more like a palm tree but there's more we could still do to make it look a little better. It still looks a bit open, not as full as I would like. I'm thinking a few more leaves would help. But we need some smaller leaves to give some variation.

Select a palm leaf and holding down shift, rotate the leaf so that it points upwards. Just make one copy for now. Next control select the trunk so that your new leaf and trunk are selected. Right click the viewport and choose hide unselected. This will give us a better view. With just your new leaf selected, apply an xform modifier and scale it smaller using the select and  uniform scale button.

You can unhide the rest of your leaves now to compare the difference in size. Once your happy with the new leaf's size, apply an edit mesh. Save.

Hold down shift and rotate your new leaf on the z axis to make some copies. Let's just say 3 for now and see how it looks. This will give us a total of 20 leaves. Now just adjust them to your liking. You might want to hide the other leaves. It will make things easier. So now here's my finished palm tree.

Again, you can add more leaves if you like. But if you have 20 leaves like I do and they're 16 faces each. That's 320 faces. My trunk is 80 faces. That gives me a total of 400 now. See how fast they can add up?

We still need to do a collision object. Might be better to just use a cylinder with 2 height sections for the collision to save on polys but it's up to you. You should be able to do that on your own. You can go back to the canopy tutorial for instructions on tagging and adding the O helper point and everything else related to preparing it for your map and exporting.

Hope you had fun. Now you can see why I saved the Palm tree for last. Just a reminder, this palm tree is pretty small. I think it's a few feet tall. Just use xform to make it larger like in the canopy tutorial. Here's a screen shot from in game to show how it looks. Keep in mind, this is after I've applied the xform modifier and scaled my tree larger.

Not one of my best looking palm trees, the leaves are too long and rigid looking. But the idea here was just to show my basic steps for creating a palm tree. Once you have learned these steps and understand how they affect the model, you can then make adjustments to suit your own taste.

shiver