Pavement Cafe Props – Roadside Tree Ginkgo

I made a tree for the first time. I love ginkgo trees.

But this model is a wrong work. Ginkgo trees should be a more conical shape. This was pruned by a poor skill gardener. Well, that gardener is me.

I put this in ShareCG. If you don’t want to read my tedious talk, here is the link;

Pavement Cafe Props – Roadside Tree Ginkgo

This is a heavy prop because this has an unnecessarily large number of leaves.

I have learned how to make a tree model with MODO. MODO has a tool which is Solid Sketch. Is it similar to Blender’s Metaball? It is a tool to draw a model by sticking ball-shaped objects together.

Arrange this to make a thick trunk. And, make a twig and specify a material at the tips of the small bump. I named the material “Bud”. Leaves grow from here.

Duplicate the twigs and plant them on the trunk.

Copy all material “Bud” and create a new mesh.

The leaf is one plane polygon. I put two polygons. In other words, the leaf will be generated two by two.

Load a Replicator, and make meshes of “Bud” as Source. Duplicate the leaf polygon to the source meshes position with the replicator.

Very easy!

But, probably I made a mistake in the source mode. Four times as much leaves were generated. But, I didn’t notice it for a while. I was exhausted to process over 10,000 leaves as a mesh. I lost the energy to fix this. The replicator generates instances of the original polygon, they are not substances. The latest version of MODO seems to be able to export instances by replicators as meshes. But, my program is old and doesn’t have that function. Instances are Not available in other programs as they are. Moreover, the instances are in separate layers. I had to work on putting over 10,000 layers together in one mesh. This work was not easy on my old Mac.

And, Poser 11 can lightly preview even high polygonal models. But, Daz Studio relies on PCs’ video card. Placing this tree is very hard for my old Mac. Then, I made some face groups.

First, click the eye icon next to “Roadside Tree Ginkgo Leaves” to hide the leaves. “Roadside Tree Ginkgo Leaves” is a child item of “Roadside Tree Ginkgo”.

And open the Geometry Editor. There are 3 Face Groups. Click the eye icon next to the twig to close it.

This makes the tree much easier to move. And, it will be better to hide the twigs when rendering in a distant view.

And more, I made 3 face groups on “Roadside Tree Ginkgo Leaves”.

Full leaves
Hide Leaves1
Hide Leaves1 and Leaves2

I couldn’t imagine making a tree is so hard. Anyway I hope you use this with my cafe table set.

PS on 12/11/2020: The Poser version of this is a figure(CR2), isn’t a smart prop. Poser 11 allows settings by individual subdivision levels for figures’ each parts. But, Daz Studio 4.9’s SubD rounds all corners. So I separated the trunk and leaves as each objects.

← Previous post

Next post →

4 Comments

  1. mininessie

    The tree looks great…now i can make a more nice image ^^
    Thank you so much!

  2. Richard Owens

    Looks very good, thank you 🙂

    • elleque

      Thank you for commenting again 🙂 Happy Holidays!

Leave a Reply to mininessie Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

CAPTCHA