Five Minute Trees:

To be fair, the first time it will probably take you a bit longer. And depending on how lucky I am and what kind of trees I'm after, it might take me longer. But it can be done in five minutes...

I'm going to outline my preferred method for making trees, it's quick and creates trees that render very quickly. At least if you go the Sasquatch route. I plan to offer and alternate method if you don't have Sasquatch (or other similar plugin) when the time comes so that any user of Lightwave 6.5 (in addition to a couple free plugins) can make a nice tree with ease.

Just a couple more notes before we begin:

  • This is a tutorial to teach methods for achieving results. There are no files to download because I don't find that to be a productive teaching method. Feel free to use and adapt the methods I provide to your own creations.
  • This tutorial builds a specific kind of tree, but the techniques can be applied to many others. I'll give indicators along the way when good places to experiment present themselves.
  • The trees it builds are not for closeups as it currently stands as there is no "twiggy" wood, nor do the leaves attach to the tree, but occupy the space near the tree branches.
  • This tutorial is not a detailed walkthrough and requires working knowledge of Lightwave 6.5.

    Okay... first, look at what the end result is:

    Lone tree on a hill.
    Render time 40 seconds, render time for just the tree (no grass on the ground) 13 seconds.

     
    Step 1: The Wood.
    First you'll need to create the woody parts of the tree. Until I get around to finishing my tree growing plugin there's a few options. 1: Download a tree mesh from somewhere. 2: Create on from scratch (There's an excellent tutorial from David Gerard here though it takes a while.) 3: Use a commercial plugin, or 4: Use a free plugin.

    Option 4 presents the fewest obstacles, so lets go with that. There's a good tree generating plugin called Hypergover. There is no English documentation, but it's pretty self explanatory. One thing to be sure of is to set the number of Undos for modeler at a high number (30 or more should be enough). Tree Cage is another free tree generator that gives more control and options (including UV map generation) but is not as easy to use.

    Hypergrover interface

    The top [execute] button extends the branches (or trunk) the [execute] button below splits all the branches. Clicking [Undo] will undo the last action. Click on both of these until you get the woody parts of a tree you like.

    It is my preference to not continue on with [Metaform -> Complete] as it ads a lot of unneeded geometry that makes editing the tree difficult and metaforming is an unnecessary step in 6.5. Simply click [continue]. Here's the blocky tree I ended up with after a total of 16 clicks. (I had to bend it up straight and fix a couple of branches that were a bit too thick at the top.)
     
    Crude tree
    Hit [tab] to see what it'll look like metaformed (If you're going to be that close to it, that is. I find that trees in the middle distance don't need to even be metaformed, surface smoothing is enough to keep them looking good.)

    Now would be a good time to save it.

    We'll go over surfacing later, but you might also want to set at least some basic surface attributes so that it looks more like a tree (brown and whatnot).

    Step 2: The Green Bits.
    Now the tutorial splits in two, which way you go depends on wether or not you have Sasquatch or a similar plugin. (and I'd welcome any reports of other plugins that you find that work well, though I have to say Sasqutch is hard to beat for this...)

  • I have a Sasquatch.
  • No Sasquatch for me! (okay, I'm not done with this part yet... Email me to bug me about it...)