Nira's VFX Blog
A journey through my master

Tag: Trees

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Advanced & Experimental Personal

Week 6: Final Trees Models using MASH, & Trees Arrangement in Environment

This week I managed to finish all trees models using MASH to place leaves repetitions, and also placed all trees in the environment.

Leaves arrangement using MASH tool in Maya

Since I realised that arranging all leaves manually would take longer that I expected, I decided to look for an alternative and quickest way. Then I found this tutorial on how to use MASH ‘Distribute’ and ‘Placer’ nodes to ‘paint’ an object over a mesh.

MASH tutorial (Ian Waters, 2017)

With the ‘Distribute’ node in MASH, I created the repetitions of the leaves arrangements I designed previously. Also, I made sure to set my MASH ‘Geometry type’ to ‘Mesh’ and not to ‘Instancer’, since this way the alpha map of the leaves will be kept and I will be able to keep the leaves texture. Then, in the ‘Distribute’ node, I set the ‘Distribution type’ to ‘Mesh’ and linked the tree as the ‘Input Mesh’ (so it follows the shape of the tree), and left the ‘Number of points’ as ‘0’ in this case. Then, I used a ‘Placer’ node so I could place the leaves pattern like painting with a brush on top of the tree. With this node I made some tweaks in its setting so the leaves were generated with random position, rotation and scale. Lastly, in order to preserve the leaves texture when exporting the trees with the MASH generated repetitions to the environment scene, I exported them in .ASS extension.

‘Placer’ node used to add leaves too tree
Final trees models with leaves exported as .ASS to preserve texture
Tree 1 render
Tree 2 render
Tree 3 render
Tree 4 render
Tree 5 render

Final trees arrangement in environment

Final trees arranged in environment – top view
Final trees arranged in environment – front view
Final trees in environment previs
Final trees in environment previs
Final trees in environment previs
Final trees in environment previs

The next steps for next week will be to try to finish the rest of the foliage and palm trees using MASH too and to start modelling the pyramid.

References

Waters, I. (2017). MASH Placer Node – Painting Points (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb2ZGa0JBns [Accessed on 20 May 2023]

Categories
Advanced & Experimental Personal

Week 4: Trees Modelling in Maya, & Previs

In this week, I started to research tutorials to model trees trunks, branches, and leaves in the most effective way, to then begin to model the trees of my environment. I also put together a previs to see the dimensions of the space.

As I am not that familiar with organic modelling, I researched some tutorials to see what was the most efficient way to model a tree. I found the following tutorials that explain step by step how to model a tree’s trunk and branches separately, how to create different variations from the same original model, and how to put everything together once we have our parts modelled. I think this way I will have different variations of trees to fill up my environment and not having to model them one by one from start.


Tree trunk modelling (Alex Cheparev, 2021)
Tree branches modelling tutorial (Alex Cheparev, 2021)

For the leaves, I found a separate tutorial that shows how to model them in groups to then pile them up in different shapes, and ultimately, add them to the tree branches.

Leaves modelling tutorial (TrimitKala, 2020)

Following these tutorials I started with the trees modelling.

Curves used to shape basic trunk model
Using a cylinder that has been deformed to add a more organic shape in the base, I extruded the roots and trunk. Then amended the tape and added a twirl of each element
Original shape
Duplicated the original shape with the curves and then tweaked original and duplicated again to have different variants

Before making the branches and leaves, I wanted to see how much space I had in the environment and how the trees would fit ini it (dimensions). So I expended some time positioning the trees in the space until I reached a preview of how the environment would look like with the pyramid included.

Environment previous

I also made some renders of the frames to see how the camera movement would look like.

Camera movement with wireframe on to see depth
Camera movement previs

References

Alex Cheparev (2021). Maya Extrude Tool – How to 3D model a tree trunk (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-ls96NCgcc&list=PLAlv9GvsMvnMCUwPx_gcXaCj_yHYdIPqD&index=64 [Accessed 30 April 2023]

Alex Cheparev (2021). Maya Extrude and Joint Tools – How to 3D model tree branches (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yDgvyGPqa4&list=PLAlv9GvsMvnMCUwPx_gcXaCj_yHYdIPqD&index=63 [Accessed 30 April 2023]

TrimitKala (2020). 8. Creating the Leaves in Maya, ZBrush | Tutorial 8 | Making 3D Scene Step by Step (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ycu3A_vf-YU&list=PLAlv9GvsMvnMCUwPx_gcXaCj_yHYdIPqD&index=61&t=49s [Accessed 1 May 2023]