Experementation

Today, I was just tinkering around in Autodesk to see what kind of tools and techniques I could apply to my animation.

The first thing that I did was to try and model a tree. I looked on 'youtube' to see if there were any tutorials as I wasn't sure where to begin. It turns out that there's a function in 3DS max that has built in trees; this I was not aware of!

So, to make a tree you:

1. Open Autodesk and create a new scene
2. Go to the create tab and select 'AEC extended', then select 'foliage'
3. A list then pops up with lots of different trees, so select the one you need and click on the viewport
4. Click the modify tab and have a fiddle with the adjustment settings until you get the look that you need.

There were lots of different options in the modify (tree selected) tab. I was able to change the height, density and pruning (how high the branches start on the trunk) and also the overall shape of the tree by selecting the 'new seed' button.