Every couple of months I find myself trying to make trees again in Maya. Today I found myself tackling the tree problem yet again…

I’ve found that using XFrog’s plant modeler program is my favorite way to create base meshes for plants. It sure as heck beats hand modeling all of those leaves… Speaking of models and leaves, the method I’ve settled on for tree leaves is to just use planes where the leaves should go and then make the planes look like leaves through alpha mapping.

Anyhoo, here’s where I managed to get tonight:

The displacement on the bark is really really weird right now and the color of the leaves is weird too. I think I’m going to try subsurface scattering on the leaves… see if that helps. More updates later…