Sculpty tree trunk tutorial for Blender?

Hello,

Does anyone know of a Blender tutorial for making tree trunks? I have Domino Marama's excellent sculpty scripts already, and I went through the equally excellent Cinemachiatto tutorials as well. Despite all that, twelve hours of my Sunday didn't get me very far, though I did end up with a vaguely trunk like object that I could not texture properly.

Thanks in advance!
Matt

ps: I have tried google and youtube with no luck so far

I see 2 options for you:

The simple option:
Get out into the woods and make some fotos from your favorite tree trunks.
Make the fotos from front, left and ... well "top" is no option
Get your fotos into blender as background fotos. then sculpt your ... cylinder sculptie and shape it ike you want the trunk to look like.

When you are done, look at our tutorial about howto texturize with fotos and texturise your sculptie (or use any other program). Use the fotos you have made before (take care to make very high resolution fotos, otherwise your final texture might not be good enough!!!)

The complex option:
Go to the blender site and study the blender forums. I think, that a have seen a tree making tutorial some time ago... I think it was about "generating" trees...
Learn from there howto make it, then learn how to UV-unwrap your results and
bake your sculptie map.

One word of warning: Take care of LOD, otherwise your tree would not look nice from far away. And consider to add details by using bump maps/shadows instead of trying to sculpt your tree in high detail... And do not try to sculpt a whole tree out of a single sculptie

And please report your progress here. I am interested about the results
I hope, that helps a bit;

Good luck

Helpful post deleted because forum attachments SUCK BIG TIME

fukin stoopid forum

Aha! I saw some 2 prim trees in SL and thought that meant 1 prim for leaves and one for the trunk. Maybe that is why I am having so much trouble! The main trunk always looks good but the branches get all messed up. I guess a 3 or 4 prim tree would still be pretty efficient, thanks for the tip!

-Matt

One thing I have learned is that you need to export the sculpties and use the LSL script that gets generated for best results. I now have something very trunk like with branches, but it is flat. My next step will be to add branches on the other axis and see if I can get them to work!

-Matt

I stopped using Domino's scripts because I don't really understand them, I am too big of a noob. I did find this tutorial: http://amandalevitsky.googlepages.com/sculptedprims and I have managed to make this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/35550458@N06/3290854523/

One thing I have learned is that it is okay to make the top and bottom "poles" of the tree a single point, but if you do that to the branches it borks the whole thing up. Also, the branches seem to work better if they are not made by dragging one point. I usually select 12 or more faces for each branch (I think).

Next I am hoping I can texture it and get something decent looking. Let me know if you can offer any advice!

-Matt

That is interesting. I also have started with amanda's tutorial on sculpted prims, but i felt it was a relief when i finaly found Domino's scripts.

Since Amanda talks about the technical details of how to transform a blender object into a sculpt-map, i wonder, what makes you happier with this information (no discredit here, Amanda is the mother of all knowledge for me and i appreciate her work very much!!!). Is it the fact, that the Domino-scripts work as black box scripts (without you knowing how the mapping is done) ? Is it the usability of the scripts? What exactly makes you unhappy? Maybe you can share this with us ?

Feedback helps to make the scripts better at the end ...

Here you talk about dealing with all sorts of LOD problems (Level Of Detail). All this is nicely supported by Domino's scripts and explained to some detail here:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/06/04/precision_sculpties_lod

The knowledge within the tutorial is independent fr0m Domino's scripts, although we used his work for simplicity...


all i can tell...:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/05/12/blender-surface-textures
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/09/01/texturizing-with-multiple-images

These video-tutorials work independently of Domino's scripts!

have fun

I could not get Domino's scripts to give consistent results, no doubt due to my limited understanding of what the scripts do. I got better LOD using Amanda's template and just making sure I kept a fair amount of space between the branches. I found two rows of vertices seems to prevent the LOD problems I was having.

I am still having trouble with texturing, but it is the same problem I was having with Domino's scripts: the sculpty texture seems to disappear if I close the blender file and try to work on it later. I have to do it all at once or things start getting unpredictable. Hopefully tonight I can get a working texture applied, though I may be able to get away with just coloring it.

Thanks!
Matt

May i ask what exactly you got inconsistent ? And how you made it better with Amanda's template ?

Maybe this one makes you happy :

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/07/14/sculpted-prims-for-the-blender-purist/

It shows basically a simple alternative to Amanda's workflow and it effectively explains how Domino's scripts work under the covers (without explicitly telling it ...

It looks like you did not save your images before closing blender. unfortunately blender just quits without warning, when there are still open files. This is not a problem with domino's scripts, it is immanent to blender.

How to store an image? In the UV-editor you find the

image -> save-> ...

function...

Hint: You also can "restore the last session" if you happened to have closed blender unintentionally (although i have the feeling, that the restore feature is not fail safe).

Maybe it is still an option for you to watch the machinimatrix tutorials ? What you can learn from them will be usefull for any kind of sculptie produtions. And you will get the grip on blender much faster and will not loose your work anymore ...

just my 2 cents
good luck to you!

Actually I went through all your tutorials, and they are great! I did not realize you had to save each image separately before saving the .blend file. :/ Oh well, now I know. The inconsistencies I ran into were mostly problems with LOD and the shape in Blender not resembling the shape in SL. Again, I believe a lot of this is due to my not being an expert in Blender or SL, and should not be taken as a critique of the scripts or of Blender.