A tree

[Nikodemus]

playing around unreal 2k4 i thought if not make a landscape looking like this:

The only problem is that CS don't have proper blending, YET. Because it may change with a dev working on it.
Anyway, express your opinion and ask how i did it if you want .

[Idoru]

tis very nice... how did you do it?

[Einnol]

Very cool-looking, Nikodemus.  I like the mix of brown and green.  So, ... how did you do it?   

[Nikodemus]

Thats how it look like in object mode (solid and shaded) and in edit mode (wireframe).
At the beginning it was a grid and a cylinder.
I subdivided each few times.

Cylinder: (working in wireframe and selecting vertices with B-key)
Before subdividing i scaled its top ring down a bit (tree gets thiner the higher we look at it )
Looking from top selected randomny groups of vertices at the rings and scalled in, the selected smaller group and scalled a bit out.
Two two bottom rings i scalled out a bit, the bottom one more.
Moved some individual groups of vertices to make some roots/tree-body look better.
Selected all vertices and smoothed few time  - teh tool you see after pressing F9 in Mesh tools tab.

Grid (working in wireframe and selecting vertices with double B-key)
Here i was selecting vertices in top viev and then moving on z-axis eighter up or down.
It is one group up and then different group down.
Smoothing

Joining together (still wireframe ;P, looking from top in orthographic viev)
Selecting groups of vertices around vertices of the tree base (uncluding this one too) and pressing alt-M (merging)
Yeah, it is taking a while ;P
Deleting faces of the grid under the tree
Filling the holes which possibly appeared (selecting 3 or 4 near vertices and pressing F ) or (by merging)

Teaxtures
There are loads of free textures in internet and all what you have to do is to mix few of them with clone tool in your 2D graphics editor.
Make them seamless with the clone tool, or use automatic tool (with flaws)
Back to Blendzor:
UV mapping with use of LSCM unwrap tool, (you select faces in UV face select mode and press the LSCM unwrap and assig textures ;P)
Before that you may need to select where are seams (in edit mode select edge and press ctrl-E) Seams are edges where texture isn't naturally seamless, so when unwrapping, blendzor won't attempt it.


I didn't really cared about the seamless thing and textures not being deformed, and also the base of the tree is made rather crappy. The whole tree is test for landscape of such construction and with the blending feature.
The whole idea of blending is that you may stop caring about some edges not being seamless, so instead of 50 textures, you may do 5 and speed your work 10 times up with better effect.

[Faldurai]

Well, looks nice. Thoug, a little bit too much polys for the game and probably also for the effect I think. You can probably reduce it without real difference. And you also could to a better passage between wood and gras. This looks a little bit to edged.
Anyway go for it.