I don\'t recall any topic which would describe trees in this form.
I imagine a forest as a bunch of trees on some landscape. 3D trees. Like in real forest, there is a lot of them, that many, that when you look up, you will rarely see the sky through a branches.
How to model a tree:
I have been examining the way how are trees done in other games and i have found out that bigger branches are 3D and all leaves together with smaller branches are part of 2D surfaces attached to the 3D branches. We can subdivide these surfaces for few triangles and model them so that it will never happen that the leaves surfaces disappear at some angles. Examine real trees, if you are not sure on what angle and how attach the surfaces and then how to model them after subdividing. The trees may not be symetric constructions, as this doesn\'t happen in nature almost at all. The 2D surfaces, should not cross each other like they do in PS currently, because at closer examination the leaves and branches doesn\'t look right, like cut in half.
Forest
The less triangles, the better, but with the above description and some more comlex trees, the triangle count is often 150-200. It\'s a lot if we are going to put very many trees near each other. That is why we should focus on simple trees. How many branches has a tree in a dark forest? Only a few at its top and so ony few leaves surfaces. If you put such tree alone, it will look weird. But if you put many similiar trees near each other, they will look just fine. More, their branches very close each other, will give illusion the trees are more complex than they really are.
Practic
People who have too low fps inside such forests, thanx to the adaptive distance, can set it properly. They will see less trees, but manage to go through it.
The leaves surfaces, shouldn\'t colide with mesh of character who go through forest. Simply because in real we can go through leaves coz they are elastic enough to let us through.
I hope this helps.
I\'m learning the whole way of doing trees for ps, coz of the reason we all know.
I know how to use blender and model such tree, but I don\'t know how to export it to proper cs format. I\'m stuck for quite a long time with that now.
I have been reading some tutorials, but none tell how to do it for a person who never did it! Most of them tell to get blend2cs exporter, export, then compile cs and viev the exported to cs file with use of it.
I heard there is a way to have the blend2cs part of blender, accessible through blender options. It is most likely matter of few files which need to be put inside blender directories, but i hava no idea where from get the files and where exactly put them.
I can\'t do any compiling at all, because i have no tools for it, and thus don\'t know how to use these. I\'m on Windows XP, so I think the above will work even if complited by someone else.
So, if there is anybody, who can help me. I have reed the stickies in Fan Art forum, but it didn\'t helped they way how i need.
