I can remember seeing a site a while back which has 3D models of trees I believe? I am a pretty poor 3D modeller, can't seem to get trees right, and I am wanting to throw a few trees into my terrain engine, just to see what its like. Does anyone know of this site? X-trees or something I think it was called, i've tried googling, and looking through the topics on this board, but to no avail. Even pointing me to a tutorial on modelling trees would be great! Thanks

There are tree generators that you can use... I'm not sure if any are better than the others because I've never used any of them.

Google'll give you all of the answers. :)

google SpeedTreeRT

Or were you thinking about something free? Cos I don't know about anything like that. Maybe one of the BraveTree art packs on GarageGames?

I would keep my hands away from the available freeware tree makers. They create High Poly trees. And it needs a while until you have figured out which button does what. I was always faster to model it by my own. And it also looked much better in my own way ...

Short tutorial of one quick way how to create a high poly tree without a tree making software:

The key is to model from small to big.

Step 1: Create a leaf. Add texture to it. Copy it, rotate it, glue together. Copy it, rotate it, glue together ... A few steps and you should have a bunch of leafes. Create a few variations.

Step 2: Create a small branch. Create a cylinder with a few segments. Add texture to it. Scale it. Move the segments a bit around to get some irregularity.

Step 3: glue the bunches of leafes onto the branch. Make a few variations of this branch.

Step 4: Create a bigger branch. Create a cylinder with a few segments. Add texture to it. Scale it. Move the segments a bit around to get some irregularity.

Step 5: Glue the smaller branches onto the bigger branch. Make 3 variations of this bigger branch.

Step 6: Create a trunk. Create a cylinder with a few segments. Add texture to it. Scale it. Move the segments a bit around to get some irregularity.

Step 7: Pick the big branches, and place them onto the trunk.

Done.

A bit practice, and you should be able to create your own trees in this way. Beware, i always ended between 100000 and 200000 polys in this way. But a tree making software does the same.

Well, you want to throw it in your game. Which means low poly. The lowest poly is to map a picture of a tree onto a polygon. No modeling effort involved. You just need a picture of a tree ... Google maybe ?

Next higher level is to work with a trunk and some spheres that contains leaf texture. A trunk is simple. Play around a bit, and i am sure you will create an useful trunk with branches. Nothing else than a few cylinders with segments. The spheres for the leafes, well, hard stuff. You have to make it round ... i have a button in my app that creates a sphere primitive in one mouseclick :D

Also here the mainproblem isn´t the modeling, but the texture. And mapping the leaf texture onto the sphere. Spherical mapping and a leaftexture in topview is the key here.

OMG? Heh, he was asking for a treemaker and a tutorial ;)

And i have pointed that my way is high poly, and that he better use low poly for his game.

But he could nevertheless render the high poly tree to bitmap, and use it as a texture for his low poly trees in his game then. So not this worthless at all. Combine it with your short tutorial how to create alphachannel textures, and he has his working trees :)