Week 10: Pretty Trees

I'm currently 7 minutes into the tutorial, just got to the bit where we are left to get on with making more branches ourselves, so thought I'd add a current render, incase I have problems like last week, so I've got a bit more to show for myself.

It doesnt look like much yet.

This is the tree 11 minutes in, just used the sculpt tool for the first time ever, I've never needed to use it before, so it was good to learn it now incase I ever do. To be honest I feel like the tree is at a stage where you could make all the spheres bright colours and it would look like a tree out of willie wonkers chocolate factory or something like, I've definutely got a visual in my head.

From the last stage up until now I've had a few problems but that resulted to the fact of not knowing how to move things from one layer to the next, therfore I had to go to an earlier saved version and do a fair bit again. On my first attempt one one of my spheres went into the new shape. On the second attempt a few are missing not really sure why, but it would mean I'd have to go a lot of stages back, so I'm hoping it will look alright without it.

Just had a bit of a panic moment at around 15 minutes my branches disapeared after generating the selection. I looked at previous comments and other people had had the same problem, so I did what they said, still a problem, followed what another person said, and a problem again. It was not until I realised there was a comment in regard to this on the lecturers blog that my problem was solved, simply not pressing the 'Fill Twigs' button. It seems so silly for one little thing to make such a difference, but that what the tutorial is so far unfortunately.

Here is my most recent render after adding the 'Normal Mapped Bark Texture':

This next render is the stage after just texturing the leaves and rotating them so the top of the leaf is facing the sun, its at minute 21:

I think its starting to look good, if only all my branches had leaves on them, but atleast I get to finish the tutorial and see an end result hopefully. And to be fair leaves on trees are uneven, so I could just say that part of the tree is dead haha.

Here is my final tree, with the red colouring as used in the 'Node Editor':

The red/orange definutely makes the leaves appear more like autumn, which is pretty approriate for the time or year.

I also created a little scene for it some grass and a background, with the background one blender kept having to close as it was crashing I presume, just tried it without the background and the same problem, thats a shame as I thought the tree looked good in a scene, oh well more time wasted.

Overall the tutorial was pretty useful, and the effect was nice, just some things seemed more complicated than they needed to be, like for example why couldnt the bark texture just be put on as a regualar texture it didnt make any difference to me but hey, nice result in the end.