Trees

In architectural visualization, trees and other foliage give a real sense of, well, realism to images and animations. Unless the trees are the focus of your scene, you’ll want to keep their poly count low, and render times fast.

There are several ways to create trees for your scenes, but if you are going to have more than 1, you are going to have serious render time issues if you use any of the built in trees/foliage in 3ds Max (under Create -> Extended -> Foliage), as these trees have many thousands of faces. Even with 1, if it is the Banyan tree you’ll be waiting a while.

This is the first part of a few posts about alternatives. This first tutorial is about using Sphere primitives.

Start your scene with a Sphere and a GeoSphere, each with a radius of 3′. Let the Sphere have 4 segments and the GeoSphere have 4 segments. You’ll see that each has approvimately the same faces.

Next, add some noise to the dimensions of the primitives to make them look random:

Noise Modifier
Seed: any
Scale: 100
Fractal: checked
Roughness: 0.5
Iterations: 5.0
Strength: 3′ in X, Y, and Z

Next, create a new VRay Mtl, and apply a dark green to the diffuse channel:

Now for some efficiency. We’ll add Noise to the Bump and Opacity maps of this green material to give the shape texture and transparency:

Material
Maps -> Bump -> Noise (30%)
Size: 6
Maps -> Opacity -> Noise (50%)
Size: 9

The Sphere is on the lefft, and the GeoSphere is on the right. You can’t tell the difference.

Now to make a forest, to see the illusion when there are more objects. The Sphere is slightly less complex, so delete the GeoSphere. Select the Sphere that is let, then:

Create -> Compound -> Scatter
Use Transforms Only
Duplicates: 20
Base Scale: 100.0
Vertex Chaos: 2.0
Transforms -> Local Translation
X: 300.0
Y: 10.0
Z: 300.0
Seed: Your choice

This leaves:

Notice how the parts the light hits are green, while the areas in shade are grey. Another thing is that the transparency is much more noticeable in the lower 1/2 of the tree than the upper 1/2. This is very useful, as it allows one to see through the trees, yet show the color of the trees in full bloom.

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