Tree Tutorial

The decals (trunk texture)

I chose texturing with decals instead of a complexe material, mostly because of it's rendering speed and for personal taste.

Rendering decals is faster then complexe materials, however, their resolution dependencies do not necessarely support close-up shots.

"Action" will now be used for branch positioning and as we know, our tree models are still flat in one axis in the object module. This will facilitate our task with the decal work.

I made a screen snap-shot front view of the tree's wireframe, wireframe lines are handy for creating texture in Photoshop.

For the trunk I created three texture maps.

One colour, Image#99 Two bumps, Image #98 Image #97 ( bumps are in grayscale ).

Notice that I doubled the colour map in order to cover half of the tree's diameter

The wireframe lines are practical for bark effect in bump map.

I create two decals, one for the front of the tree and another one for the back, each with three maps (one colour and two bumps). voir Image #991

That's it for the trunk!