First the trees, then the forest

I started working yesterday on my first serious tree. I've tried modeling trees before and found them to be quite tricky. Something about the thousands of tiny branches makes them a pain.

Nevertheless, nice trees are yet another a requirement for convincing game worlds, and the first area of my game is going to feature several lovely copses. Unity has some nice tools for creating the forest (there's literally a "make forest" button), but before you can have a forest, you need some trees.

After some brief research I went with a pine tree. One of those tall ones shaped like a cone. For one thing, it will fit well with the atmosphere of the game world. For another, it's shaped like a cone. How hard could it be?

The modeling process went something like this:

• I started with a cone and manipulated it around until it looked like a decent pine tree trunk.
  
• Then I created some smaller cones to use as branches and distributed them along the length of the trunk, making them smaller as I got higher on the tree.
• Then I was ready to texture the trunk and primary branches. I found a nice, free pine bark texture here and loaded it into the GIMP, the open source graphics editing program. One "make seamless" filter, some rubber stamping, and about 20 minutes later, I had a passable, tiling bark texture. Very exciting.

Unfortunately, this is where it got hard. Foliage, it turns out, is even more detailed a thing than branches. Following Unity's advice for creating trees, I tried to create a simple group of polygons that could serve as small branches and needles. The idea is to duplicate these polygons, tilt them, and scale them until they fill out the entire tree.

As you can see from the picture, I barely got started. First I had to find a suitable texture (the one I found could still use work). Then I had to figure out how to work with alpha channels in GIMP and transfer them to Unity, which is a little tricky (I'm still not sure I could do it again).

Despite the complications, I feel that progress is being made. If I'm happy with the result, maybe I'll post a more detailed tutorial about modeling a cone-shaped pine tree.