I see a lot of Rowan trees on walks with my dog.  I thought I’d have fun creating a totally digital tree using only Filter Forge, Plant Factory and Vue.

First off, I created some single leaves in Filter Forge using the Leaf filter.  I did a little tweaking of them in Photoshop.

Next, I created a stem in Plant Factory and used a selection of the leaves to make Rowan-like clusters.  I saved them as a .tpf file to load into Vue.  In Vue, I rendered several variations, also with a variety of colour and saturation.  These were saved as .png files for using back in Plant Factory.

These were then used as texture bitmaps on Warpboards in Plant Factory, using at least 5 or 6 different images for variation.  The result is 3 (currently) different Rowan trees that look pretty much like those along our canals.

I also created some “rowan-type” branches using the clusters.  These, at some future point, will be used as bitmap textures on Billboard leaves to be used as lower poly background models.

Then, yesterday on my walk, I noticed how the leaves were turning Autumnal, with different colours on the clusters.  So…..back again to my favourite softwares, I also created several Autumn variations of the same trees.

These are the “branches” that have been created to use as bitmap textures on billboard leaves, which I will post here once they’re done 🙂