Artifact 5 - Scenery Tree

Scenery Tree

Construction Process

This tree will build part of the scenery from the train scene. The tree is a very simple construction but has created many problems in its construction process.

The tree begins with small squares made from flat green planes. The small flat green planes form the leaves of the tree and the lines that the leaves sit on are the branches formed from the line tool.

The branch soon becomes a construction of this process cloned over many times using the 'Clone' tool until the branch is full of lines and sqaures that form the tree branch. A couple of thin cylinders are added into the bush of twigs and leaves to form a thicker branch. These thicker branches are then added with a Bitmap of Bark from the Material Editor tool.

The Tree Trunk

The tree truck is the main sector of the tree. It is formed by a construction of a cylinder edited with the editable poly tool in order to shape it into a truck and thick tree branches. The tree truck is bare until added with the bark material from the material editor tool.

The file of leaves and twigs along with the thinner tree branches are now merge into the scene along with the tree truck and pieced together to form the over structure of the tree.

Problems

This form of structing the tree has created a scene that is now full of shaped polys which is an issue when trying to reload the saved copy of the 3DS Max file. In the first atttempt of the tree construction a file was created at the size of 95MB!

The tree has now been re-structed in order for it to contain less polys and shapes so that the rendering period is reduced as well as the loading process. This will play a considerable advantage when it comes to rendering my work for my final project trailer.