Today I wanted to create another type of tree on Maya, my previous trees created have been a test then a birch, this time I wanted to focus on basing my tree off an oak. Along with this I though oak trees would best suit my landscape scene successfully so I needed to create one. Below you will see my processes and learning through this.
I started by setting the project file adding the skylight and a plane for the tree to rest on then finally creating a polygon cylinder for the basic trunk.
This cylinder had too many subdivisions so I halved the amount from 20 down to 10, this allowed for a more productive and edge orientated tree.
Following this I split up the sections of the cylinder using the splicer tool and modified the vertex’s on the shape, I made the top of the tree become smaller as it went up to create a more realistic effect. Compared to my last method used for my birch tree, this took a lot less time and it allowed me to use my new skills learnt to create something entirely by myself with no outside help.
Next, using the main trunk as the base I made multiple small branches. I did this by duplicating the base then bending sections of it to add some difference. I then rotated and added more of the trunks transformed and shrunk around the branch piece. 
With a basic overall branch completed I could then duplicate that and copy it all around my tree rotating and transforming as I went in order to differentiate them all. After going around the tree and checking to see if everything was connected I moved onto texturing the bark.
I textured the bark by finding a seamless bark texture and applying it to a lambert material. With this I went to the UV editor and set an automatic cut and sew map for the object. After understanding the basic look I modified some handles to keep consistency throughout the tree then growing and shrinking others in order to create the optimum effect. Below you can see my UV map for the woody parts of the tree. 
This is a screenshot of the tree and its bark unhighlighted so that you can get a nicer and better visual of what I have created and accomplished so far. 
Next I moved onto my leaves, I started by flattening out a polygon cube and splicing a leaf design over the top then deleting the other edges to leave a flat leaf shape to texture. Below you can see my finished leaf shape.
I didn’t capture the texturing stage but after applying its material I started to duplicate the leaf over and over again. With this I transformed and rotated it each time to differentiate the leaves and create the illusion of them all being connected to a branch. I had to keep grouping and duplicating to save time and speec my process up. With this I had to create a mesh and delete the old groups in order to prevent the software from lagging by creating more. Below you can see a finished leaf section.
With these leaf sections I duplicated them all around the tree placing them all around onto the end of the branches which I had created. I also added some smaller leaf sections to the end of the stand alone branches underneath and inside the tree. This allowed for the highest realistic visual for my creation. Below you can see everything which I have done rendered, after I viewed this I realised the base was to straight and it needed to change in order to match with the rest of my tree.
Below you can see two images of my final product with everything fixed and completed. You can see an outside of my tree rendered along with the inside looking up at the branches for a different visual angle.
Outside:
Inside:
Overall I loved creating this tree and I am glad I did because it allowed me to see my own progress and how I have improved from my last model. A few things which will need to be fixed are that the file which contains the tree is quite large for maya and is 50MB. The issue for this is that I am wanting to create a forest with this and if I duplicate it a lot of times it will only increate and eventually be too much storage to keep. I will need to find a way to limit this or maybe create a brush of my trees to save storage and keep my file sizes low but I will need to do some research to figure out how to do these things.
Animation Blog 