But this means that \(v - e + f\) does not change. Press "Apply" on the modifier once you are done with all these steps.What do these “moves” do? When adding the spike, the number of edges increases by 1, the number of vertices increases by one, and the number of faces remains the same. Make sure to press the "Smooth" button and to check the "Auto Smooth" box as the image shows. Go to the "Modifiers" tab in the properties window, and press the "Add Modifier" menu and select "Normal Edit" - you will find it in the first column. Next, we can use a special trick to make our branch look round. You can also change the UVs of some of the planes so that they are mapped to the second branch, for some variation. Rotate some of the planes if you need to. Now that we can see our texture, you might also want to make sure that the root of the branch in the texture looks like it is coming out of the right place. You can enter edit mode and move the whole mesh to fix this. This is the point where the "ball" will be attached to the branches of the tree, so it can't be in the center of our ball. The pivot is the place where the arrows appear when the object is selected. You should now see the texture on top of the model inside the 3D viewport.Īnother thing you want to make sure of is that the branches originate from the pivot of our branch object. Finally, press ALT+Z to swap to "textured" render mode. Drag the color output from the texture node into the yellow input of the Diffuse node. Click to place the node, then select the texture from the drop-down menu (or using "open"). First though, we need to create an "image texture" node, which you do by pressing SHIFT+A inside the node editor like you see in the image. We won't really be rendering too much, but linking the texture to our material here lets us view how the texture looks on the mesh.
In your image viewer window, you can now use the little menu marked in the image to swap to the "Node Editor" (you can also use the hotkey SHIFT+F3), which lets you edit how your material will be displayed in Blender. Create a material inside the properties menu and name it something appropriate. When you are done, hit TAB again to exit edit mode. Use SHIFT+D to duplicate the plane, rotate and move it using R and G, and place it in a ball-like shape like you see in the image below. While you are in the user settings menu, you might also want to change the primary mouse key to LMB in the Input tab - this makes everything more intuitive to work with. It is included in Blender by default, and all you have to do is search for it in the Add-On tab and enable it. Next, we need to enable the Sapling Tree Gen plugin. Make sure to restart Blender and then activate it in the Add-On tab in the user settings.
To install the MDL exporter, follow the instructions on the github page.
In this tutorial, i will be teaching you how to make awesome tree models for Warcraft, procedurally using the Sapling Add-On in Blender! This is an exceptionally fast way of making trees which also supports many different tree shapes.