What's the Procedure to make Trees for the Game?

[Mr Maison]

I imagine trees would not be considered props. The trees of the game sway in the wind so I imagine the properties are different than stationary objects. If we make a tree in Xfrog or Blender, do we have to do anything special that's different from making buildings and props?

 

[Shroomblaze]

No, I just finished my first tree. You basically make the object in your favorite 3d modeling program. Import it as a tree and the asset editor will automatically apply the swaying animation. You can do this with any object if you want. If you imported a building as a tree it would sway too.

The difference between buildings and trees though is that they use different shaders... so you can have double sided planes as a tree but if you import as a building you can only texture one side of a plane because unity will make the other side invisible.

 

[Mr Maison]

Wow that easy huh. Thank you. Now off to Xfrog

 

[TMagician]

I also have a couple of questions regarding tree modelling:

-how do you create a proper LOD model? All of my custom trees vanish when viewed from further away. The standard *_LOD.fbx naming technique also doesn't fix this.

-why do custom trees sometimes turn invisible right after plopping them? This happens on certain kinds of ground (e.g. near streets). The shadows are visible but the tree isn't.

-how can you implement different versions of the tree which will be used when the tree is affected e.g. by ground pollution?

-is there a way to remove the smoothing effect that is applied to the model after importing it as a tree? On more abstract shapes it looks strange.

 

[Mr Maison]

OK so I successfully got a tree into the game. But like I been reading from others, what's up with the difference between the 3D app and what it actually turns out to be in game??

This is what it looks like in Blender

And this is what it looks like in game

In the game there's a serious fringe effect around the leaves. But zooming closer it looks better but still fringed. Is this where the LOD model comes in handy? In this case I didn't make one.
I hate what the game does to the texures. It's like too much subsurface scattering and a plastic material preset.

UV mapping this was a B*@#!! BTW