I'm currently a part of a project working to create a projected forest in an exhibition room. The goal being to show to effects of the forestry industry by having this digital forest cut down and burned and regrown through the course of the exhibit.
Today I started working on making this forest with the very esoteric program Speedtree. Speedtree is a very industry-standard program with a singular purpose, make trees. Really, really realistic trees. Most notably a large portion of the vegetation for David Cameron's visually stunning Avatar was made with Speedtree. I, lacking the combined might of Weta Digital's crew, am setting my sights a bit lower. For now, a single pine tree.
Turns out, getting Speedtree to give you your desired tree is incredibly easy. I chose the pine preset, changed a couple of values for the number of branches, and voilà. The issue now, this tree has over 2 million faces, and we're hoping to have a couple hundred trees in our scene. This won't do. I'm going to have to find a way to drastically decrease the face count if I want to use this program for the project (the alternative route being to make the trees by hand, many many man-hours I would rather not spend).
The initial thought was just to cut down the number of leaves, however, that produces a rather sad, wintery looking tree. It also made the tree look, smaller? It just doesn't have the sense of scale the bushier trees had.
So the journey for a usable face count doesn't look like it'll be quick and straight forward. So for today I'll settle with a good shape for my trees, and leave optimisation for tomorrow
Comments