Subtitles of the Movie

Let's continue looking at the Plant Modeler now. We had added branches to our tree and I pointed out the fact that an important thing to know is how to control the junction between one branch and another, a main branch and a trunk, or some of the branches that break off, and how you control that as it goes further away in distance so you don't have to get penalized for render times as Carrara calculates all this additional detail. We'll pop into the Leave Tab now, the next step to take a look, and we've got the leaves to choose from here. We can choose a Preset Leaf, we'll pop that open, and these are actual geometry that get loaded onto the file, but it goes through a really cool little process called Instantiation, which means that Carrara takes this one little piece of geometry and creates a replica or a duplicate of it without actually creating more geometry on your tree and that's one of the reasons that Carrara is able to keep the file sizes so small when it works. The free Tutorial I mentioned as part of the VTC Sample on my web site, mikebremmer.com shows you how to also make some basic geometry and map real pictures onto it for an additional boost in reality if you would like to. We can select these here. I'm going to stick with the one that's the default at the moment and choose Cancel. But you determine how many leaves you want and again, for these dynamic leaves, you can go ahead and slide things around to get it to be just the way you want it, so for leave size, if you're working with juvenile plants or mature plants, or something like that, it's really easy to go ahead and simply just modify these things on the fly, real common sense. The next step is Tree Shape. And this is what the tree looks like. We've got our Leaning Trunk, we've got the leaves showing up now because we've already gone through that but you don't have to be stuck with this. There are some other shapes that you can go ahead and work with based on some typical botany. We can go with Hemispherical, and you can change those. The Recursion is how often this shape repeats itself in the course of the tree so as we move down the trees you'll see detail getting added and subtracted to it. Additionally, this is the point where you start adding some realistic behaviors or shapes to the tree in terms of things like gravity so the smaller the branches are the further down they droop, or you can have the tree go upwards, this way I've got it pointing down increasing the gravity, negative value for down. This is also at the tree shape point where you add Wind features into the tree. This is something Carrara dynamically does for you so you don't need to keyframe these behaviors during animation. Major, major time saver, especially when you've got, say, a small forest of replicated trees, you don't have to go in and modify all the trees, you let Carrara think about the one and then Carrara will continue that information through all the replicated objects. You can control Wind Direction, how fast the wind is from that direction, and you'll see it update here Ð they pretty well move a little bit. And you also have Rustle capability, how irregular, or unpredictable that wind is. You'll notice in the scene that we're not seeing any leaves at all, and this is an important little feature as we start working with Carrara more to make this happen. You do have the ability here Ð let me close this down just a little bit Ð where you can export this tree if you want, and in order to actually have the leaves show up as part of the exported geometry, if in fact you want to convert this to geometry and there might be time if you do want to do that, you need to enable Full Detail Mesh and Show Leaves for that to happen. By enabling Show Leaves they show up in our scene so I get an idea of what it looks like and this is important when you start working with the trees in your scene you may want to get it only so close to the building and, being able to see the leaves helps. But if, in fact, you want to export this object out using Carrara's Export features, the Full Detail Mesh needs to be turned On in order for that to happen. By clicking that you won't really see any update in the window, it's just enabled an ability for that to show up. The last Tab we'll take a look at is the Expert Level. If there's anything you wish you could do to the tree and you hadn't found it in the preceding Tabs, this is where you'll find it. This is where you get into really highly detailed capabilities if you create a specific tree and you manage all these varieties of things you can control, save it as a new tree so you don't have to do it twice. This lets you control curves of individual branches, or I should say, generations of branches, all sorts of really cool stuff for that Ð how thin they get toward the end as they progress outward toward where the leaves attach, really, really nice items here. So, there's the introduction to the Carrara Tree Generator. Very powerful, very fast, and very easy to use. In our next section we'll go ahead and take a look at working with Terrains and Skies.