Hi all

So I am trying to work out how to make trees and bushes etc.

Does anyone know of any good tutorials for this kind of thing - all the tuts I find tell you how to make trees etc. and render them in Blender. It is not how to model the trees, but how to make the textures for Game Guru that I need some pointers on.

I see that trees and plants in Game Guru do not use transparency - in the FPE Transparency = 0.

So what format is the .dds - dxt3, dxt5, ?

All my efforts end up with the model being white in game guru.

The only way I can make it work is to use:
- FPE - transparency = 3 or 5
- FPE - entity_basic.fx
- and save the texture as DXT5. This is obviously wrong, because if you light map the level the trees fall over - lol

Where as going by trees in GG it should be:
- transparency = 0
- tree_basic.fx
when I do this my models are white in Game Guru

So any of you good people know how to do this properly?

Thanks for any tips....

Reliquia....

Blender has an addon for generating trees I think it comes package with it and you can activate it via the options.

Go to File > User Settings
Go to the Add-ons tab
Type tree in the search box

You should see an add-on called Curve: Sapling Tree Gen

Turn that on, now when you go to the add menu you should have a new item under Curve called Sapling Tree Gen, when you place it you will get a load of options available in the toolbar menu on the left. You will have to play around with it as I haven't tried it yet, but apparently it's quite good.

Hi Belidos,

Thanks for the reply

It is not making them that is giving me the headache - it is the actual texture creation that just eludes me!

I have spent the last hour or so looking at all the different purchased foliage I have and there are a multitude of different settings used in the FPE for many of them.

Some use transparency, some don't. Some use entity_basic, some character_basic, some tree_basic. So not too sure what is correct setting and when - there seams to be no consistency to that. The same can be said for use of transparency.

One thing is common for all texture_D files though. they all have an alpha channel that contains a black and white image, as you can see in the attached image (this is one the jungle tree that come with GG.

For the life of me I can't work out how to do that in photoshop.

Reliquia...

Sorry, was reading quickly on phone before heading out to work, thought you wanted help with the modelling. My bad.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but I think you mean that you want to add for example a plant texture to a plane and have the bit that's not texture transparent right?

I'm no good with PS, never used it because it just looks complicated (and now it's subscription based I never will), I use gimp.

When I make something like this I load the image into GIMP, then right click the main layer and select add alpha, then I highlight all the areas I need transparent and just delete them. Then I save it out as DXT5. I usually use transparency = 3 or 5 (I cant remember which and I think there was some debate over which is the better), and it works for me.

As I say I have no idea how to do it in PS, but hopefully you can transpose it.

Ok yeah, I think I have that ok now. Thanks for the tips Belidos.

What I can't get working now is getting a tree to lightmap without falling over.

It works if I just make a typical entity and use polygon collision, but if I use, for example collisionmode = 59 and collisionscaling = 100 the tree will just fall over after light mapping the level.

It is no big deal for me because I don't like the look of outdoor scenes that have been lightmapped anyway, but it is just that since they fall over, I am obviously doing something wrong

Reliquia....

I'm not sure what collision mode 59 is meant to be, but the three generally used are 0 (box collision), 1 (polygon collision), and 11 (no collision). I've not heard of collisionscaling, never had to use it for anything.

It is used commonly in FPE for trees, It seams to allow you to have a small collision spot around the trunk of the tree, without having to calculate the collision for the entire tree canopy.

Reliquia....