Pawas - 3D Studio Max Tutorials - Making Tree in 3D Studio Max

By: Olli-Pekka Saastamoinen
http://www.saunalahti.fi

I've got many "How do you do your trees?" questions. That's why
I ended up doing this tutorial.
This tutorial doesn't use any plugins. All you need is 3D Studio Max.

Picture on the right shows my result of this tutorial.

All comments to
ops@saunalahti.fi
http://www.saunalahti.fi/ops

I assume you know 3DS Max basics.
This tutorial uses quite big pictures, so please be patient.

Click here for my landscape tutorial

Now let's start.

Make a cylinder
Height segments: 10 *
Sides: 18 *

*I used these settings.

Next apply "Noise" modifier.

Now scale your cylinders bottom vertices

Scale your cylinders top vertices

Now we have tree trunk ready.

Next we make a branch

Again cylinder
Height segments: 5 *
Sides: 5 *

*It's waste of polygons and your CPU's power if you put here too big numbers.

This is the cylinder after edited with "Edit Mesh".

Here's my final branch.

It's wise to apply your texture (or atleast UVW map) now, because now comes some serious cloning and it's pain to apply textures when you have tons of branches.

Group your branch.
Now it's just cloning your branch, rotating, scaling and positioning.

As you can see I've tried to make all branches to start from different position with different sizes. Looks more realistic.

There it is. Treetrunk that is. On next page we add leafs.

PART 2