How exactly do you make good realistic trees and such? I see everyones images have excellent trees. Is there some sort of trick? Thanks for any help:)

some are pictures mapped to a 2D plane with an alpha channel. others are made in other applications http://www.best.com/~calyxa/pearl/tutor.html this tutorial from Calyxa has a neat way of useing symetrical lattice's with intersecting booleans. hope this helps Hawkfyr

You also might want to make sure those pictures you saw with realistic trees weren't done in Vue.. that's Vue's strong point - great vegetation. Sadly, Bryce can't quite compete with the Vue vegetation, or the ease of making it, at least, though many of the better artists on here have done outstanding work in that field. Umm.. hehe.. good luck.. it's a lot of work, but it is possible to get good-looking trees. =) Rosh

thanks dudes

Listen, can we kidnap someone and get them to enable vue to export that vegetation? Seriously, the best way I know of to make realistic trees is with lattices. But it takes some heavy duty work. You have to make the stump, then the body, then the branches, and then if you want super realistic, make the leaf bodies in lattice. But it's render intensive, and I wouldn't recommend doing more than one tree like that in a scene unless you're prepared to render for several hours.

You can also use tubes (images of tree or leaves) similar to using a nozzle plugin to "spray" leaf textures. There are also other programs out there one of which is called Tree Druid ($99 US - I think - Check in Yahoo) and one prog for other vegation types is free called Plant Studio (again - Yahoo). Vista Pro is great for 2D or 3D trees, though I don't know if the prog is still available. Most other 3D apps will enable you to make a passable tree but it take some fussing (what doesn't). Good luck, - Art - ("branch" manager)

Lol Art

I can attest to the fact that Tree Druid and Plant Studio make some great vegetation! The standalone version of tree druid allows you to make fully customizeable trees in a variety of species. Plant Studio is amazing for such a small app! You can create your own plants, then select a number of them (I ususally use two, but sometimes three), and cross breed them for a variety of interesting plants! Very cool indeed. Headgamer

This is true. I can't afford tree druid, but plant studio is free and a relatively small download. It's NOT user friendly, but it's not too hard and it can make some amazing plants, tho I dunno about trees. It will export a rather large DXF file if you've bred through several generations and variations, but if you set the file save right you can make each part of the plant seperately texturable to get whatever effects you want.

Plant Studio rocks. As does L-System. For leaves on dxf models, the foliage and foliage2 in Bryce miscellaneous materials works fine. Great with some tweaking. Try applying it to terrains as well. WEEEEEE