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+  "text": " And Mark, take it away. Let's see, Mark, where did you go? Can you hear me? Oh, now I can. Yeah, I had sort of some network dropout going on during this. No problem. So I really think my name is Mark Fincher. I'm currently a senior motion designer at a motion design studio called already been chewed and I've just been kind of working my way through computer graphics for the last, you know, decade plus and eventually found myself falling in love with Houdini and really just this is what I kind of do full time so I'm sort of one of several Houdini artists here in the Dallas area that work at already been chewed and I kind of am sort of like the I do kind of like a lot of the, you know, visual effects, knitting, explosions, kind of destruction stuff for various like shoe spots and stuff like that. Basically shoes and watches and other, you know, things like that. So that's sort of, that's sort of my background. Am I coming, is my feet okay right now? It was a little choppy in the beginning for your bio, but it's okay. Let's keep going with the lesson and then we'll let you know. Okay, cool. If it does come down to it, I'll throw in that network cable and hopefully that'll cure things. But I'm just going to move my thing over here and switch over to share screen mode. And this is the Houdini project file that we're going to be working on today. So welcome to the, what is, what did we call this course it was the procedural growth with kin effects and the lab street tools with with Houdini school. Today, we're going to be creating something that looks a lot like this. Ultimately, the goal of this course, we're going to be working towards an animation that will be a growth animation for these trees and then we'll actually like create kind of a wind system that is driven in sops that kind of mimics the flutter of leaves and the bending of branches as wind blows through it. But today we're really just going to wind up with something like this. We're just kind of focused on the lab street tools themselves and how we can use them to just model a. A pretty basic starting point for us for this lesson. And we will be sort of kind of building this. But also I'll kind of go over more or less all of the features of the lab street tools that are going to be relevant to us and to you if you're looking to kind of make your own type of tree. So I'm going to just scoot this over off to the side here. And so I can reference it and then I also wanted to kind of show this this is this kind of gives a closer view of the wind system that we're going to kind of build. So this is, you can see what we're going to be doing. This growth is going to happen. And the flutter and then the flutter of these leaves kind of increases as the wind blows through them and stuff like that. So it's kind of inspired by my looking at speed tree. For a project, we were researching speed tree and really found it to be like such a powerful system. And the lab street tools is very close to, the lab street tools work very closely, very much like speed tree in a lot of ways. So I, in diving through them, was able to kind of work with them and discover how powerful they were. And so we're gonna kind of go over those now. But the other thing I wanted to mention was that I will be using a couple textures for this course. So those textures are, if you are on the course page here, if you're looking at the syllabus and you scroll down during, into the what you need to take this course section, you hit read more, and there was these two textures here, the maple leaf texture and the oak bark texture. Really these textures, you can use whatever textures you want. I have them up right here. I think I have this one. Let me get the maple leaf one up here. I'm going to also be using, so I'm going to be using these two textures, but really any texture you want to use is fine for this. You know, if you want to find your own leaf atlas and your own trunk texture or branch texture, anything's good. I just needed to have something. So these are free textures off of texture.com and you can find those in the links on the actual, on the course page. So I'll be using these. But yeah, and I'm also going to be working in redshift. But generally, since this course isn't mostly focused on rendering per se, it's really focused on like the tools themselves and how to build a tree. I think most of us probably know how to make a good looking rendering. And I'm not going to dwell too much on it, but I don't want to leave you stranded trying to figure out how to get an atlas stuck onto a tree. I mean, we don't want to have we just want to pick out one one or two of those leaves and attach them to our tree. And I want to kind of get you all started in the right direction with rendering, even though we're not going to be doing like really intense rendering for this course. So I'm assuming that if redshift isn't your thing, that you're probably able to apply materials and whatever render engine of your choice, we're not going to be going that heavy into it. Cool. So with that out of the way, let's get into the actual looking at of these tools. So I do have a lesson over here by the way on the course page that will explain how to install the SideFX Labs tools if you don't already have them. And since I didn't wanna mess around with my system and installing and uninstalling the SideFX Labs tools during a live session, I pre-recorded that. So that's there for you in case you need to determine whether you have the SideFX Labs tools or not. All right, so here we are with a blank scene and I'm gonna hop in and start making some trees. So I've got my, let's throw down a geo to get started. And I'm gonna just call this my tree and just gonna jump in there. And then I'm actually, because a lot of these parameters are pretty long, I'm gonna just split my view a different way. I'm just gonna pull down the Alt key and tap on this little bar in between here. So I've got my network view on the left and my parameters on the right, just cause they're very tall parameters to work with. So getting started right off the bat, I'm just gonna throw down a bunch of the trees, the tree tools, and then we can kind of like explore their parameters. So I'm just gonna start and I'll go and kind of show you where you can find them. In the labs section, I just hit the tab key and go to labs, world building, and then tree. And you can see you got your six labs tree tools here. So we're gonna be working mostly with the branch generator and the trunk generator and the leaf generator, but I'm also gonna start with the labs tree controller because this is going to give us a whole bunch of parameters that we can use to act as kind of a global and so they're going to behave. We got the labs tree controller, that's kind of the start. And then we want a trunk generator. You're gonna throw that down. I'm just gonna wire in the lab street controller into the right port on the trunk generator. This creates a controller input. And you can see that here, once I highlight this, we get a tree trunk. Now I'm just gonna throw it on a branch generator. And I'm going to wire this in as well. You can see that when I highlight this, it takes a second to cook, but we get our first generation of our tree branches. It's going to change my background to dark, make it a little bit more visible. Does that look okay to you guys? Everyone able to see that? Yes. Excellent. Okay, cool. Now, the first thing that I want to do before I start throwing down more generations is the resolution of this tree is pretty high right now, and it's also doing a Boolean operation where it's kind of merging these branches in with the trunk. And I want to kind of reduce that to make things perform a little bit better while we're doing this. So I'm going to just hop up to the tree controller. And I'm going to just switch over to we'll go over all these tabs, but first thing I want to do is switch to the meshing section. And here where it's doing Boolean and normal blending, I'm just gonna switch that to none. And you can see that instead of kind of cutting out the tree, it's just kind of sticking the branch into the side of the tree like that. Just, it's just a little bit less for, a little bit less to cook. And then, also over here on the resolution tab. Oh, Mark, actually, can you hear me? You are cutting out a little bit more than we were hoping for. So maybe maybe we should take that tiny bit of time to get your that fix that you were talking about. Yeah, let me go plug in real quick. I'll be right. Okay. So, so everyone, if you need to take apologies for this, if you need to take a little break that you weren't able to get, this is a good time. Yeah. Sorry about that. And it's, it's, it's sort of threw me through a curve, curve ball. I'll be back in one second. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't that bad like before we started. And then, do you guys agree, David? It was a little more than we were hoping for. Yeah, it started up. It kind of comes and goes. Yeah. Is my video usually this bad like this? That's usually how you guys see me with my awful internet. I was just wondering. This one was worse. Okay, so it wasn't just me. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure everything's smooth. I just wanted to make sure, is that how I was in my class? I'm just kind of... I don't think so. I don't think so, yeah. Maybe because everyone was sleeping when you were doing your class. And your whole country, everyone was sleeping. Oh yeah, my class, my time I think was like 11 PM or something. Yeah, I see. I've not. Yeah, just to clarify, sleeping because of the time difference. The class is awesome. Yeah, no, the class is awesome. That was not the actual class time. Okay, I am back. Can you see me? Okay. I can see you. How's your Houdini? Houdini is still working. So I've got four, I have four copies open. So I'm hoping that. Okay, let's do it guys. Thanks. Thanks everybody for your patience. Yeah, sorry about that. I just did a speed test and it's really fast. It's just, it was creating licensing issues. If you're joining us now. I was having licensing issues when I was plugged into the land and so now I'm just we're just going to roll with it. It's going to feel better so far. So far so good. Okay, excellent. Your video feed is better too. Great. Let me get my screen back going on here. Are you able to see that? Yes. Excellent. Okay. So where we were was I was just kind of optimizing some of the settings in the Tree Controller to make them behave a little bit better in terms of just reducing cook time so that we can kind of get through this demo faster without having to wait for the tree to cook so much. So one of the things that I just did under the meshing tab of the Tree controller was I just set the intersection behavior to none. And then the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to hop over to the resolution tab and increase the resolution, which you would think that an increased resolution would actually lead to higher resolution geometry, but in this case, I think it's more of a spacing value. So if I increase the resolution to from point one to point eight, you can see that it's, you know, we've got less sort of segments along our branches and then over here on divisions, and I'm going to increase that to point eight as well. that to point eight as well. You can see we've got a pretty low poly tree at this point, but it's going to make things kind of run a little bit faster for us while we're doing our work here. All right, I'm going to turn off wireframe mode and now let's kind of just throw down a couple more generations of this tree branch generator. So I'm just going to option drag this out and wire it in like so. So you kind of follow this down like you would with vellum. You've got two streams and one of them is creating the geo and the other one is actually generating an output for the underlying splines that drive the way that this tree is constructed. And these splines come with all sorts of attributes on them that we will be getting into when we build our rigs later. So we've got branch level, branch ID, we've got level groups for all of our primitives, for our branch levels and all that information we can use and make assumptions about when we're designing our rigging system to handle the animation of this tree later. I'm going to just throw down one more generator for this right now. I'm just option dragging and then wiring both of those in there. So now we've got quite a few branches on our tree and some of them are even like running into the ground which is kind of cool. I think that it's neat that it's smart enough to know that those those branches shouldn't go through the ground, but they kind of collide off of it. Then the other node that is really of concern is the leaf generator. So I'm just gonna throw it on a labs tree leaf generator. And again, these two streams on the left correspond to those two inputs that we've been following down. And if I highlight that, you can see that it places a bunch of cards for us on all of these branches. And that's sort of, you know, is, you know, kind of what we do normally is now we'd put a texture on these cards, but we're not going to get that to that until later. So what I'm going to use in the meantime is the tree simple leaf. So I throw in a labs tree simple leaf here this third port on the tree leaf generator allows you to kind of put in whatever type of geometry you want to supply to it and this tree leaf generator. if I just highlight it and zoom in. You can see it's just a very basic leaf. That's about one unit in size, so it's like a normalized scale. And we can just use this to visualize what our leaves look like. And it looks a little bit nicer than just some cards. So you can kind of see that we've got a bunch of little tiny leaves on our tree for right now. And so that was like a really quick overview of those like three or four main tools about how this works. And so for the first part, I'm going to just kind of go over how all these, parameters work here, and then we're going to work towards building a tree that looks like the tree in our example right here. So let's just back up. I'm going to go back up to the labs tree controller and maybe get the first generation of tree branches showing so we can kind of go over what some of these global settings are so this tree controller really is a way to kind of control all the features for all of the of your tree all at once. So if I switch over to the tropism tab, let's kind of learn about what these tropism features can do for us. So we've got a little bit of, you can see that gravitotropism is enabled right now. And tropism really describes like, it's a phenomenon of plants to kind of, I think it is like a influence in like how the direction of the way plants grow and bend. So really common one is gravitotropism. We can kind of just crank this value slider down and like it will determine how much, wilt these branches have as they're coming off of our geometry. And likewise, we can like, we could make that go negative and then they would kind of wilt up and grow up. Additionally, there is the bendalong parent. So I'm just disabling gravitotropism. That's, gravitotropism would be like, if you wanted to build a weeping willow where everything was kind of drooping over. Bendalong parent is similar in the sense that it causes what might look like a wilt, but it actually just causes the branches to adhere to the directionality of their parent. So right now they're all kind of going up because their only parent is the trunk, which is vertically oriented. But if I were to turn on the second level tree branch generator, you can see that these additional, that these child branches are also trying to adhere to the direction of the parent branch at the location where that branch is being connected to that, at the location where that branch is being connected to its parent branch. So that's sort of what bend-along parent tropeism does. The other one we've got is phototropism. And this is sort of one that you see a lot with with like flowers and they will, if you have a flower pot kind of, you know, in a window, it will, the flowers will tend to grow towards the sun. And so in this, here by default, the phototropism is in the, it's pointing in the positive, one in the positive X direction and one in the positive Y direction. So from the view that I currently have, that's up and to the right. So if I increase the strength, you can kind of see that it's influencing the growth of this tree towards or away that direction that you can specify here in the phototropism. And then lastly, we have the thigmatropism. And I kind of like to think of this as like almost like a vine system. If you wanna grow the tree and have it sort of adhere to a piece of geometry or have it appear to be influenced by a piece of geometry in your scene, you can plug some geo in here under your object here. So I'm just gonna create a sphere real quick. And I'm gonna grab the manipulator and kind of just maybe, you know, for demonstration purposes, just throw this sphere up here in these branches and then go and grab the tree controller and drag the sphere into object one of the thigmatropism. Now, if I template the sphere, you can see that all of these branches are sort of kind of giving it a little hug, you know? And there's kind of growing around that sphere adhering to it. So if you wanted to build like something like a vine system, you could probably use this stigmatropism to do that. We're not going to be doing that in this course, but I thought it was kind of cool to demonstrate. If I, you know, drag this around, you can see that it is receding quite a bit, but you do get that it sort of is attempting to grow around that sphere. Now, if I go and increase the strength beyond one, things start to grow into the inside of the sphere. You can see that kind of those branches starting to make their way into the sphere. And then if I decrease it, you can actually see that things are starting to get repelled. I could even go negative with this. And that is repelling the tree from growing into that sphere area. It's almost avoiding it. So you can kind of create some influence using regular geometry using the thymotropism. One other thing I just wanted to cover real quick is I'm just going to go back to the first generation here and turn back on on our tree controller, the bendalong parent, and you can see that all these tropisms give us a ramp, and that ramp more or less controls how much influence we have along the length of that branch. So if I were to kind of increase the strength of this, increase the strength of this bendalong parent, and then And then I can actually kind of ramp off how quickly that kicks in along the length of the branches that comes out of the tree, which is a really cool feature to have it's just very art directable to be able to control how these things behave you can almost kind of create like a little, a little angle in there a little although in those branches if you wanted to. that off for now. The next thing I want to do to kind of make this perform a little bit better, I'm now realizing is that on my tree branch generators, I have a, they have a detangling setting on where they try to avoid one another. I'm going to just turn that off real quick. So I'm just going to select my three tree branch generators and go to advanced and unclick detangle. That's just going to make things not have to kind of click through several iterations of trying to detangle themselves. It should perform a little bit better in that regard. All right, so back to the tree controller. We've covered the tropism tab. Let's now take a look at the noise tab. So the noise tab, we've got two different types of noise with our tree. We've got line noise and mesh noise. The line noise is actually applying noise to these underlying skeletons that are defining our tree branches. And so that will like actually, you know, affect the the overall curvature and shape of our branches. But then the other type of noise is mesh noise. And that actually affects how the surface of the geometry is noise depth. Now, when it's pretty low res like this, you can't see. So I might override the resolution a little bit to just for temporarily to kind of illustrate that. But what I want to do is just kind of demonstrate line noise first. So let's just go back to the tree controller and we'll look at line noise. You can see there's two noises in here. We've got primary and secondary. I like to do what I like to do and I'm trying to shape my tree is to kind of turn off the secondary temporarily by setting its intensity to zero. And then I'll go and look work, just kind of work on this primary noise here. So you can see if I increase the intensity, I can get some pretty gnarly looking branches out of that. And I can also adjust the frequency. It's typical noise settings that you would be used to. You can almost make lightning out of this tree generator if you wanted to probably. And, you know, it's got roughness and step size and all that. I'm going to just hit, I'm going to, I think it's control middle mouse on all these to kind of set them back to default. But you can kind of get an idea how that noise can be used to add some character to your, to your branches. And then the secondary noise, you can actually is just another noise of the same type that just added additional frequency on top of your noise. So if you wanted to, you could double up both of these noises on top of each other, and we will be doing that later. Just kind of wanted to show that first. So I'm just going to set those back to normal. And I'm just resetting my parameters to default by holding down control and middle mouse clicking on all of them just kind of set everything back to the baseline before I move on. Then under mesh noise, what I said, I was going to actually increase the resolution of our geometry real quick to look at that. So I'm just gonna go back to the resolution tab and I'm gonna control middle mouse on both the resolution and division. So we've got a little bit more resolution here. And you can already see some of the effects of that mesh noise on the geometry that we have here. So if I go back to the tree controller and go to the noise settings and the mesh noise tab, you can see that we've got this kind of, we've got this noise that we can sort of adjust actually on the tree itself, that might mimic something like bark. You can increase the frequency and just kind of add some sort of character to the surface that's generated by the tree, by our tree branch generators and trunk generators and stuff like that. So I'm going to just control click both of these to set them back to normal and then we'll move on to the next tab. So for the next thing, I'm actually going to switch meshing back, the resolution back up to a value of about 0.8 for the resolution and 0.8 for the divisions. to keep things a little bit more low poly. I'll be hopping back and forth between that resolution tab quite a bit probably just to keep things performing well. But if we go to the pruning settings, and I'm gonna actually go to the last generation of our tree branch generator, you can see that we've got a bunch of branches that are kind of pointing out in all different directions. And where the pruning controls come in handy is that we can actually kind of chop off branches that are facing in a direction we don't want. So for example, like if this tree branch is kind of pointing down, we don't want things really growing into the ground like that, this pruning will analyze what angle the branch is coming out at and kind of delete it for us. So if I just increase this downward facing angle slider right here, you can see that it starts to make the tree adhere to only keeping branches that are growing upwards. So that's a really handy control to have when you're trying to make your tree look little bit more natural. I think this looks pretty natural to me compared to what it was before where it's just kind of growing all over the place. But different plants grow in different ways and you can make any type of plant with the tree generator, I'm sure. So it's not exclusive to making just maple oak like trees like this, but you know some plants do grow in all different ways like that. So upward facing angle does the opposite of that. It just kind of trims the branches that are facing up. So that's pretty self explanatory and the directional angle. This next one down here, the directional angle is very similar to what we have before. So in the by default, it's going to trim in the z axis. So I'm just looking. So my z axis is pointing off to the right. And if I increase that directional angle, you can see that it is trimming off branches that are facing along that z axis. So we have additional control there. And then this second setting is more or less the same settings for all of these branches, except it's going to analyze the end angle. So the upward-facing angle and downward-facing angle and directional angles are all determined by what the end point of each branch is as opposed to its root. So before we were kind of analyzing the initial angle as a branch comes off of the tree like so, so this first branch right here, we would be sort of analyzing this angle right here. But depending on some of your noise and tropism settings, you might have a different angle at the tip. And that's really what these controls will allow you to control is what the end facing angle is and upward facing angle is for the tips of your branches. So that's how pruning works in a global sense. Then meshing, we went over this already, but I just want to zoom in to illustrate it one more time since we're here. The intersection behavior, the way we have right now, if I put it on wireframe mode, you see that it's just a big piece of geosticking into the trunk there. What we can do is actually change the intersection behavior to do a Boolean plus normal blending and you can see that it actually takes a little bit to cook but it cuts the branch off and is no longer intersecting with the tree but it's trying to kind of create a geode that feels like it's kind of fused with that surface and then if I turn off wireframe mode it's kind of hard to tell here but it's doing somewhat of an attribute blend between the normals of the trunk and the normals of the branch to kind of make it feel like it's a little bit harder to see that crease there, that seam there, where those two would be touching. And then you have the option to just do that normal blending without having the boolean take place too. So that could be an option too, if you want something that performs a little bit better than having the full-on boolean going on. I'm going to just turn that off for now, say none. And I'm going to just hop up to the tree trunk generator and look at the top of it for this next section where we determine what the end caps look like. So in the tree controller, we've got end caps right now. It's set to grid. I could set that to none. And you can see that it just, you know, this is more or less telling Houdini what kind of geometry to stack into the end of that trunk like so. And we can choose like single polygon, I think default is grid. And this other one is single side single polygon and I'm not quite sure but it doesn't seem like that is working for me so I'm just going to leave that to grid the way we the way it was when we kind of came in here and then we have the resolution settings we kind of went over these as well but if I um you know if I increase or if I decrease the resolution along the trunk you can see that we're getting more divisions along our trunk like so um and same with divisions if I decrease those we get more resolution around our trunk like so. And the refinement amount, the way I understand this is sort of like an adaptive poly reduction kind of feature. So if I crank that up you can see that straight areas of our trunk actually have a lot of the divisions removed from them. And when I dial that down we get closer to the original resolution of our trunk. So that's just sort of a little optimization parameter in there if you would like. So I'm going actually for this next section on the tree trunk generator, I'm going to leave the resolution where it is for right now. So let's just reset that to default and we're going to control middle mouse on the resolution and the division. So resolution of point one, divisions of point two, which gives us enough to kind of look at our next features that are coming up here. The next tabs on the Tree Controller, we have the Material tab, and this is where we can apply, I think, more or less a material here, but since I'm going to be doing my materials, I'm going to be applying them in more of like a traditional way using a material node later. I'm going to ignore this for now, and I think that also displacement is a similar way that you could apply a texture here and actually have it displace the geometry surface. And also, LODs and visualization, I'm not going to cover those as well, but this would be a section where you could determine, you know, different levels of detail for your tree if you were going to be like making them for gains or something like that where you'd want to lower resolution tree further away and a higher resolution tree closer. So those features are there if you want to explore those. But for now, the main features of the tree controller are covered. And so now it's time to move on to what the tree trunk generator is doing. Is everybody doing okay? Does anybody have any questions so far? Excellent. I don't know if I can see the chat or not. So if something comes up, let me see if I can pop that up. I got you. Excellent. Okay, cool. So now let's take a look at the features of the tree trunk generator. This one's really cool. The first tab right here just gives us the controls that you would think. So length, you can choose how long the tree is, you can choose how thick the tree is, and also a ramp where you can control the kind of tapering of the tree. So if you want your tree to be really skinny at the top, you can kind of bring all these values down and get a nice taper, something like that, if that's what you're after. So it's really nice to have those curve, those ramp-based controls on the fan. So that's pretty self-explanatory there. Additionally, in the second tab here, we've got more tropism controls. And this kind of works now like a, if you're familiar with a take system or something like that, you can provide global settings for your tree using the tree controller, and then here you have override. So if you wanted to override your thigmatropism for this specific generation, this trunk generator right here, you can override that and supply different geometry. So this trunk will try to behave independently of the overall tropism settings that are controlling the entire tree by the tree controller. So that's sort of like an override setting there. The bend setting does what it says and allows you to just kind of add a little bend to your tree, however you'd like, as well as a curve to control how, where and when that bend occurs in your tree. So there's that. And the next one is the trunk shape. The trunk shape is really cool. This trunk shape allows you to create the illusion of root spigest sort of doing a radial displacement around the base of the tree. So if I say enable roots, you can see that it, I think the default setting is a little extreme, but you can see that it's popping out these roots in this pattern that's defined by this ramp. So you can kind of adjust the positioning of these root features, dependent on where you're popping out these little bumps in your ramp. So if you decrease the shape offset, you can bring this back to something that's maybe a little bit more realistic. But it kind of creates that feel that this trunk is generating branches that are kind of reaching out into the soil below, which is a neat feature to have. This position ramp is similar to the ramp on the general tab, where you can kind of control how high up the tree the those roots go. you can make a twizzler if you wanted to with this setting. It looks like. And then the roll and twist, these attributes just kind of control like how much twisting is going on along your trunk. So you can kind of make those roots kind of take a nice, you can almost make like sort of a sci-fi fantasy looking tree using those kind of twist settings like that. Hey, Mark, we do have a question from Paul. Any way to create actual routes like the speed tree does? I haven't noticed a way to do actual routes like that, but I think you might be able to, I can't say for sure, but you might be able to make another, like just kind of copy your tree setup and maybe actually just flip it upside down. And build routes that way. Yeah, what about mirroring? You could just put a mirror stop, right? Maybe? might be, I think that the roots will actually kind of spread out quicker to, you know, than they would going into the ground. So I'd have to do a little research on like how roots are formed. I don't think that that is taken into account with these tools, but it would really be cool if it was. And you might be able to actually redesign a different type of tree that was upside down that would mimic something a lot like a root system. That's a good question though. It's really cool. Yeah, so this is sort of how you can kind of mimic that the way the roots would look if they were forming above the tree. I'm just going to disable that for right now. And the rest of these settings are ones we've already covered. So it's these are overrides for the noise. If you wanted to have a different line noise here than on your tree controller, you could override that and it will allow you to supply a different type of a noise pattern just to your trunk if you wanted to. So I'm just going to turn that off. Same thing with mesh noise. You can control all those things here. So those overrides are always available to you. And in fact, when I go and build my tree, I don't really, I kind of like going node by node with my settings. When I'm building a tree, I feel like it just feels a little bit better to me than using the Tree Controller to control all the settings. So I actually just will disconnect this later on in the lesson and just go and build the trunk and then build the branches and so on and so forth. But I just kind of wanted to, it is part of the workflow and it is really powerful to have a global place to control a lot of these settings so I just kind of wanted to have it there to show you that you can create overall settings for your tree and then override them on the branch or trunk level, something like that. And the meshing resolution settings, those are all the same. You can override those here as well. So the next node is the tree branch generator. And this one has a bunch of a whole set of nodes or of parameters that are specific to it. So if I go to the general tab and I select the placement tab here, you can see that the placement mode is scatter at the moment. And we can more or less just choose how many branches that we want on this node by adjusting that scattering amount. So I can add 17 branches if I want to. And it's going to scatter them. The other way you could do is use edge length. Edge length is more or less gonna just try to, you're more or less just kind of determining how far away the branches are placed from one another. So it's a similar control, but you're not specifying necessarily, it's more like a density control. It's not specifying exactly how many branches you want, but it will actually try and keep them spaced evenly if you were to go back to the trunk and try to decrease the length. The number of branches will actually change, but they'll all sort of stay the same distance apart. I'm just gonna reset that. And so that's kind of how you can choose how many branches are being generated. I'm just gonna switch this back to scatter and we'll scatter eight for right now. And then here, this section right here is gonna determine, you know, our kind of like the angle, the angling of our branches as they're coming out of our tree. So right here, you can see we've got a branching pattern of 137.5, that's like a Fubanachi number. So I think that basically what it's saying is that we've got this first branch down here and then the next branch is actually gonna branch off 137.5 degrees around. So if we're looking at this one, like this angle from this branch right here to this branch right here, that would be 137.5, which is that figure not your number and look, I think I might, I might actually epic pen that one right here. You can see this is the first one. And that's the second one. And this angle right here should be that 137.5 degrees. And it does that with each successive branch. We'll kind of branch it off at 137.5 all the way around as it goes up the trunk like that. We have one more question from Larry. Does only the tree controller have the repeal track geofeature any way to have more than one geofor this? Is that the thigmatropism setting? I believe that you would, if you were going to want to have two different types of geos work that figmatrop is in type setting. You could probably, let me see here, let me just, I think if you, you would want to kind of merge everything together. So if you wanted to have a cube and a sphere, and then you would merge them together, and then you would kind of create, you know, your overall null that would, you know, this would kind of be the, this would be the overall geo that you'd want to plug in there. So we could say this would be avoid or something. And then if I go into the tree control, let me just move the box into a meaningful place. Like so and so we've got our tree and let's just make this box a little bit larger. Give it something to work with here. But now that we have, you know, we've got a box and a sphere and those have been merged. And now if I, if I'm, if I'm thinking about this, right, they should all be avoiding both of those things. So let's go to the tree controller into the tropism and thigmatropism. And instead of sphere one, I'm gonna put in this null right here. And it looks like it's trying to avoid both of those things at the same time. So you really just wanna kinda merge everything into one stop like this and supply maybe that null instead of just straight up geo. So anything I think you would pipe into here, would just want to into here you just want to make sure it's all merged. Does that answer that question? Is that sweet? Cool. Let's hop up here. I'm just going to turn that back off for a second. And we were in the, oh yeah, we're in the, yeah, this tree branch generator here. Let's turn off that template flag. Cool. And yeah, so we were talking about that branching pattern, sort of the angle in which it comes off. The next setting here is sort of, we can control that so that we can change that branching pattern to something like 90 degrees. And then if I take an overhead view, you can kind of see all these branches are coming off relatively at about 90 degree angles from another. And then there's the 180 degrees option, which really just has them kind of coming off left and right like so. And this is kind of a cool setting if you were gonna be doing something with like, maybe creating like a big leaf or a palm leaf or something like that. you could model that pretty well using this stuff. I actually am going to be using the 180 degree mode later and our last generation before our leaves because it just looked nice to me to have that those 180 degree splits from one another. Here they're set to alternate. We can actually do opposite and that'll double up the number of branches but you can see they're all coming off opposite one another. So that's sort of another feature of trees. And then you could also do the radial option. The radial option is actually gonna give you branches per node setting where you can actually choose how many branches you want coming off in a circle around your tree. So you might make a Christmas tree doing something like this. I don't know. I would have to research the properties of whatever tree you're making, but these are all structures that apparently occur quite often in nature. So they've given us a decent selection of things to work with there. I'm gonna set this back to 137.5. And here you can see there's this angle variation And the angle variation slider will just kind of randomize that distribution a little bit if you want as well. So that's there. The next sitting here is the branching angle. So this branching angle kind of determines how far up, or like what angle the base of this branch is coming off of that tree. So you can see if I set this up to 90, you can see that the very, very top branches are almost perfectly in line with our trunk. But if I, and then there's a ramp down here that kind of controls that. So if I bring up this lower bounds of that ramp, you can see we're almost folding our tree up entirely so that it all is sort of, all of those branches are just lined up along our trunk. Just gonna undo that. But that gives you sort of the control of, how quickly your branches fall off, how quickly they decide that they want to start growing in the direction of the tree trunk or the parent branch that's underneath it. So that's kind of what that is. If I reset that, here we've got our angle variation. So the angle variation is also an additional random value that's being added to all of this. And then roll will just rotate your branches radially around. So you get a little bit of control there to kind of control where those branches are coming out. And the randomization of the roll doesn't seem to work too well for me. So I think it might be on a per branch basis. I'm not sure how that's seated. but you, I think, may be able to do it on your second generation. And if you randomize this role, I believe that the branch, each branch might be rolling those slightly differently, but cool. So I'm gonna just reset those real quick and we've got our length. So the length of our branches, if I just go back to this first generation, the length of our branches is a value of 0.8. This is a multiplier on whatever its parent was. So this trunk right here is about 10 long. So this will be about 0.8 times 10. So it'll be about eight meters long. So if I decrease this value, you can see that it's all kind of changing. The length variation just adds some random values to that. So that's good. And then the length ramp kind of controls like where upon your trunk that these things all sort of start. I think that this inherited length profile, I think it only works on second generations. I'm not quite sure. But this, I haven't had too much luck getting this to work. I would think that this would change the length of the branches as they increase towards the end. But I found that that setting is really kind of controlled by this length ramp up here. If I dial this back a little bit, I'm just grabbing this end knot of this ramp. Let me just grab it here. If I grab that N knot, you can see that we're kind of changing how quickly the length of branches kind of falls off as they get closer to the tip of their parent branch. So that's sort of, that's sort of the settings about, you know, the angle and the length of our branches. The next one is how we control the radius of our branches. So by default, similarly to how the previous thing works, where we're determining the length of our branch based off of the length of the parent branch. This radius is going to be determined by the radius of the trunk where the branch is being placed. So this branch right here, for example, is going to have a radius. It's very close to the radius of the trunk in the location where that branch was placed. And then as we go closer to the top, you can see that these branches are a little bit thinner, but they match closer to the radius of the trunk where that was placed. So if I really drive this down, if I I'm just decreasing the thickness of our trunk towards the tap, but making it really thick towards the bottom. You can see that effect taking a little bit more hold here, where these branches are just thicker near the areas of the trunk that are thicker, and thinner near areas of the trunk that are thinner. So with that control, you have the ability to control the falloff. So how quickly they taper, you can modify that behavior using this ramp. And then the radius adjustment will just allow you to override, you know, that inherited radius from its parent branch by just like tweaking that value like so. And you can straight up override the inherited radius and just generate this however, however you would like you can just directly set the radius if you'd like that's what this is here, just going to turn that off. Like so, the next thing is a pruning settings, which is very similar to what we covered before. But with this one, I think we have another feature here. Yeah, if I turn on the second generation tree branch generator and look at its pruning settings, we can override pruning and adjust those settings, you know, as an override of what we had applied on the tree controller up here. But we can also just do a random manual prune. We can just randomly prune this by increasing the slider. And if we increase it all the way, all the branches of this second generation are completely removed. So you can kind of use that to add a little bit of extra control to that aspect of it. And then the manual prune, I don't know if there's viewer state bugs or whatever, but when I try to use manual prune, I kind of get some issues. So I'm just going to show, this should allow you to pick, to single out a branch on your own and just non-procedurally destroy it. So if I grab, if I hit that picker tool and I try and like, you know, pick one of these branches, I just can't seem to get it to, you know, select the branch correctly to be able to delete it, hit enter and it populates this with a bunch of little numbers and stuff like that, correspond to the primes that I just selected, but no branches really got deleted. But what I did find is that if I just reset this setting, and let's just go and I'll kind of illustrate this on the regular tree branch generator, but in the prune setting, I could just set a manual prune of zero and that's gonna get rid of that first one. And then you could kind of work your way up the tree like so. If you wanted to get rid of the third and fourth ones, you could just punch in three and four there and you would delete those branches. What are those, are you think that's like a connectivity thing? Or do you think, because those can't, they can't represent a premium because it's zero, right? Or one, you know what I mean? Yeah, I think that they are representative probably of, let me see here. Yeah. It might be the branch ID that we're providing. Cool. Because I think all of these generate branch IDs. Yes. Here, there you go. So if I go up to this one, see, but it might be self-contained to its individual level. Like if I prune level zero on this second generation, I don't think it's removing a, I don't think it's removing one from, yeah. Oh, I saw. It's removing like the first branch of that generation. So it must know. Yeah. So it must know what the idea is there. I'm just not exactly sure how it's determining it, but that's there. Yeah, that's there in case you need it. You might be able to actually manually go and prune the curves off. So I'll just try this real quick. I don't know if it's gonna work or not, but if I wanted to say, get rid of, if I wanted to get rid of one of these right here and I go into primitive selection mode just grab it and delete it. I'm not sure if this, so it has given me a prune number here. I'm just gonna wire that in between. So we're now blasting this off in between our generations. And then our next generation won't have that branch on there. And it seems like, yeah, I think that that branch was this one right here. If I turn that off. Now it seems like what it's done is it's pruned. It's prune that branch from existence and not allowed any branches of this generation from spawning on it. So I'm not quite sure how the structure works there, but that option is available if you're able to kind of figure out what branch it is that you want to prune in terms of a number, you could just throw down zero and then kind of middle mouse and slide over this until it finds the branch that you actually want to get rid of. You can see them kind of all popping in and out. Probably not the most ideal way. I don't think that's the way this tool is intended or this parameters intended to be used, but you could kind of try and zero or zero out or zero in on the branch that you want to get rid of that way. Got it. And then under the advanced tab of the true branch generator, there is the setting to detangle. And that, like what we were talking about before, is just going to add a little bit of a avoidance where these branches are gonna try to avoid one another, like so. And it kinda adds a neat little, it kinda adds some nice look to it, where it kind of, they kind of pop away from each other. It almost is like adding another additional noise to it, but it just helps it, you know, kind of fill the space a little bit better in some cases. I'm gonna leave it off though, cause I think it makes things take a little bit longer to cook. Yeah, I'm seeing here a Davis question about visualizing the branch ID with a marker and see if there's a match. So yeah, let's do that. Let's go back to the tree branch generator. And I'm gonna just go here and choose a branch ID. And I'm going to just change this visualizer. I'm actually going to pull this up. I'm going to duplicate it because I'm going to want this visualizer later. So I'm just hitting this Copy button here. And I'm going to change the type from color to marker. And we're going to say, that's the title is text. Yeah, that's good. So I can see here that this tree branch right here is two. I don't know if you can see it on the recording because it's really tiny. but those are a bunch of twos all over that tree branch right there. And so if I go in here and put in two, it's getting rid of it. It's getting rid of a different this branch over here. I think it's actually getting rid of it's getting rid of the next up branch because branch ID zero technically is the trunk. But in this generation of branches, it's ID for that generation is one plus the trunk. So it's going to be. So to get rid of branch ID 2, it's going to be 1 minus that. So I'm not sure if I'm not like 100% sure if that's the best way to do it in terms of, I don't know where this ID is really being stored. If it's not referring to that unless this parameter is tunneling down and saying do 1 minus whatever this is, or do 1 minus what max ID from the previous generation was or or something like that. Well, at least there's a relationship. I think that's good enough. Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, I'm just gonna reset that. And let's see here. We were looking at detangling. Yeah, so that detangling feature is there, if that helps. And then grid behavior, I'm not 100% sure on what the grid behavior does. I haven't explored that too much, but the ray points to surface is actually going to try to get the points that were generated by these branches to stick to the surface. So if I go wire wireframe mode, this isn't really a Boolean, but it's actually rang these points that are kind of sticking into the geometry. It's rang them onto the surface of the previous generation branch. So that's sort of what that does. I'm going to turn off that visualizer real quick. And yeah. So that was all stuff that was covered in the general tab on the labs tree branch generator. And the next tab over are all sort of the same things we've already discovered. So tropism, noise, meshing, all of this stuff is really similar, if not identical to what we covered in the Tree Controller. So all of those settings are there on an override basis. You can control them on a branch generation basis and so on and so forth. It's really handy to have those available on a per level, branch level basis. So the next node in our line, we kind of went, so we kind of covered all of these Tree Branch Generator nodes all at once. to just kind of have more of them there to kind of illustrate. But I just want to kind of go over some of the features of the tree leaf generator. So this tree leaf generator is, it got a lot of the same placement controls like we were discussing before. So if I look at the tree leaf generator and look at placement, I'm actually going to maybe disable the previous generation so we can really kind of just see, you know, how these leaves are behaving along one branch a little bit more clearly, it's not so cluttered. But here you can see that we've got our placement settings. So here we've got leaf node distance. This is like a density control. So if I increase that, the leaves are spaced further apart from one another. If I decrease that, we can get them very, we can just get an insane amount of leaves all stacked on top of each other. So that's sort of like a density, sort of like a spacing attribute, how far away they're spaced from one another. Just control middle mouse on that to reset it. You can also use a ramp. So that will allow you to kind of change how densely these are, how densely these are distributed along the length of the tree. So if I increase, maybe if I decrease this, I think that it's, they're more dense towards the beginning and then they kind of fan, they space out closer towards the tip. Just gonna turn that off and control click that one to return it to normal. And then here we've got overall scale. So this uniform scale is set to 0.4 by default. That's cool. Uniform scale variation adds randomness to the scale of the leaves. I'm looking over here. Armin, you tested it. Tested it, and it was associated with level ID. But it gets so difficult to see that I think just scrolling through them is easier. Yeah, the actual trees, tools themselves, are pretty gnarly on the inside. If you dive into them, there's just a whole lot going on. And this is looking inside the tree branch generator. there's just a whole bunch of things going on here. And I was able to get in there and modify them. And the last lesson of this course, we're gonna kind of change the way our rig works by modifying the inside of the tree branch generator and stuff like that. And it's gonna be really, it's kind of interesting. It took me a long time to build up the courage to look in there to try and modify it, but there's a lot going on in there and it's really well thought out, but there are some things you're like, wow, if I could improve this. The beautiful thing about Houdini is that you can get in there and modify that behavior if you really want to. So that's such a cool thing about these tools and in the labs tools and most of Houdini's tools in general that just almost like little open source projects inside of the software for you to explore and experiment with. So here we've got the, we were looking at just kind of the leaf shaping tools. We've got this sort of, you can add randomness to the scale. you can also adjust the scale of the leaves along the branch like so. So they just kind of, as the leaves grow along the branch, they get tinier. And then we've got pruning controls. Pruning controls are similar to what we discussed before. There's a random threshold. And then there's a prune by light availability. This is kind of a cool feature where it's going to, if we have more generations of branches, I'm just going to increase this. And maybe what I'll do, it looks It's like if I increase the threshold here, what it's trying to do is it's actually trying to analyze a light source coming from above by default, this light direction, which is pointing in the y direction. It's trying to analyze if rays are hitting those leaves, and then it's removing leaves that are inside that aren't being hit by those rays. So for our example project, though, we're going to be working with PAC and Instance. So we're going to be instancing our leaf geometry onto this geo. Can you change or rotate the directions of leaves? Yes, there is a orientation tab coming up. We'll get into that shortly, but you have all the controls of how you would orient the leaves right here. So this light availability thing, this light availability really only works when you have actual full on geo for your leaves. If I turn on pack an instance, it seems like it doesn't want to work the same way that I would imagine. Or it might actually be working, but it looks like it's messing with the branches below it. So I'm not quite sure. I'm not quite sure what happens inside of the lab street tools when I turn pack an instance on what prune like availability is doing. But it's there if you aren't using pack an instance. For our example, we're going to be using pack an instance because the way we're going to animate our leaves is going to be modifying like prim and transix and rotating and stuff like that. So I'm not going to be using prune light availability pruning for this, but it's a really cool feature that is there if you need it. And then again, let's see in the branch place, the general advanced tab, you have the ability to sort of offset these branches, offset these leaves from the underlying branch, if you want to, if you need to do like a correction because your geo was off a little bit, you can kind of adjust that here. And then I think that then these are just different methods of calculating normals and whatnot for this setting right here. So getting to the orientation stuff, This is sort of where you would control like how random these leaves are kind of branching off of this branch. So we've got roll, roll will kind of determine where along the, where down the length of the branch that those leaves are spawning off of, what direction they're kind of spawning off of. So a 90 degree angle, I think is what the default is. We'll kind of like make them come off to the sides and make them sort of available to light above. The yaw will actually control how the branches are oriented kind of along the branch. So you can kind of get them, if you increase this, you kind of get them to point along the branch or down. All of these have ramps, by the way. So we could, you know, change the yaw to be much more intense towards the end than at the beginning. And you can kind of see these branches are rather fanned out over on the right, you know, towards the stem here. But as we get, as we travel down that branch, you can see these leaves are starting to point forward more, which is a nice control to have. And those, these ramps are, you know, kind of buried in a lot of these parameters. You can find them throughout the whole entire, throughout a lot of the parameters on this, on this, on these tools. So if I just reset that, We get random randomization for the yaw. And then we get our pitch angle. The pitch angle will do kind of like, you know, what angle it's coming off at around the tree with respect to, you know, with respect to almost like the normals of the initial instance itself. So if you wanted to make a bunch of flapping birds, you could do that with the tree leaves and stuff like that. So you can randomize that as well and kind of randomize the different pitch angles and stuff like that. And then twist, actually I have to slide the slider to remember what that one does, but twist will actually twist the branch or the leaf right around its stem. So wherever that branch is kind of coming out, it just kind of rotates it around an invisible axis. It's kind of pointing along the leaf. It's gonna reset those. So those are sort of the orientation controls of the leads. You have a ton of control about pretty much every angle you would want to have those things spawn off of, which is nice. And then here we also have tropism, where we can override that. Now, if I have pack an instance on this tropism, I can't even, I can't do anything with tropism because tropism like is a feature that kind of works on the mesh level itself. So if I turn off pack an instance, we get the bendalung parent controls and the gravitive tropism and stuff like that. But it's going to be trying to affect the actual mesh of the geo itself. And I have found that it's really touched. Like I have to use really extreme values to get it to kind of kick in. But if you are doing like straight up geo for your leaves, you can kind of control that using these tropism controls here. Same thing goes for the noise. You can add noise to your leaves themselves as long as it isn't in pack and instance mode. So if you wanted to add additional noise to all of your branches, all of your leaves, you could do that using these kind of controls like this. You can kind of mess those leaves up a little bit if that's what you're looking for. So you got your primary and secondary and then resolution, it looks like resolution right here is going to actually determine what these pre-made cards are resolution are. So by disconnect the tree leaf generator, these pre-made cards, you can kind of control how much resolution is there. But we're going to be making our own cards to supply for our tree in just a second. So that those are sort of like the main core tree tools inside the tree, the lab street tools. These are sort of the basis of what we're going to be kind of using to build our tree in our main example. But there are a couple other ones I just wanted to cover real quick before we go into looking at how we can just kind of set up the materials and get our tree looking the way we want to for the rest of our project. The tools that I wanted to look at were one of them is actually a parameter and the other one is an actual, is the tree branch placer. So I want to throw down a tree branch placer to start off with. And this tree branch placer is very similar to the tree branch generator. It takes in these two inputs and we're just going to look at placing a branch, placing branches onto the trunk. So So by default, nothing happens. And there's two modes that the Tree Branch Placer operates in. So the reason why, I want to make it so that it's known that you know that this tool exists, because in our advanced example, we're going to be using it. But like what we were looking at before, where it comes to branch IDs and stuff like that, I found that the Tree Branch Placer isn't actually generating branch IDs and branch leveling in a meaningful way that would work with a rig that works with the tree tools out of the box. I had to modify the innards of the lab's tree tools in order to get tree branch, custom tree branch placement to work with the rig that I had created. And I also had to modify the rig that I created. I had to kind of make both meet each other halfway in order for that to work. But I want to make sure that you know that these tools exist because they are rather cool. So the tree branch placer has two modes of operation. One is placed branches and the other one is drawn branches. You can actually supply a curve in the second input that will allow you to draw a branch. So if I throw in a curve and I'm going to just switch to my front view by hitting space bar three and I've got my curve tool. I'm just going to draw a nice little curve coming off to the right like so. And notice how I actually started drawing when I was rehearsing last night, I started drawing my curve up here and drawing it back towards the trunk. And it actually wants you to be drawing your curves from the trunk off to the, you know, away from the truck so more or less your first point should be around the trunk. And I don't know why this is the case but by default. It doesn't line up with the curve we just created. Actually, if you look at the drawn branches section right here, it comes in with an angle of 133.5 and a roll of 138. And if I reset, oops, I set roll to zero and angle to zero, you can see that if I template this and grab our curve, that the curve is perfectly lined up with the true branch that we just created. And if we switch into editing mode, we've got total kind of control and art directability of the way this hero branch works, which is really, it was really cool to have this kind of control. We have a question from Larry. Will you show us how to modify or redraw the simple leaf shapes that is possible to make any shape you want for this? Actually, Larry, I believe you can just plug in any piece of geo instead of the leaf that it gives you. And I don't know if that answers your question, but you can put any, as far as I know, you can put any piece of geometry, right, Mark? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, cool. Yeah, as long as it isn't too heavy, so you wanna like manage packing and instancing correctly and stuff like that, if you're using like large instances with like really high polygeo. But what we're gonna do in just a couple minutes is actually create our own leaf cards so that we can render leaves that look kind of like, what was the example? I don't know. We're going to, there'll be a transparent leaves. Let me just pull up the, I don't have the video handy, but we're going to be creating our own leaf cards and kind of plugging them in there. And that should give you kind of an idea of how you can create your own geo and supply it to this tree leaf generator. So, oh, yeah, we'll definitely kind of get a feel for that. But in just a sec. And so the tree branch placer, the curve method of placing branches is cool. We have that one. I just want to demonstrate the other mode of operation. So I'm just going to turn off the curve for right now and go to placed branches. And placed branches will just let you, you can click the plus button here. And it will add a little branch down there at the bottom. And you actually can just position it by hand by adjusting the parameters in this little thing that pops up here. So you can see you got a length parameter, a position parameter, and I really only think that modifying the position parameter works really well, but there's the rotation parameter you can kind of control where it is around the tree, and it's radius and it's bend and everything like that. So you can kind of adjust the up vector angle of that. So that's another way of kind of hand placing branches if you want to do that. But because of the way the attributes are generated on this, like I was saying, when you create your tree for next week and you want to follow along with the rigging that we're going to be doing next week, I wouldn't use the tree branch placer because it's not going to generate the attributes that we need, at least that I've found that's going to work with the tutorial that I made because of just limitations of the number of attributes that are coming off. But at the end, we are going to dive into a more complicated example where I modify what attributes are being output from these tree tools and the tree branch blister so that it all falls in line and is able to work in the bigger rig. The other parameter that I wanted to explain in the same vein is an attribute issue related to branching, or sorry, it's a parameter issue related to providing branches to certain levels. So if I, for example, want to now do my second generation of branches off of this tree branch placer, I'll just kind of show where this kind of comes into play. to play. I've got this custom branch that I actually use the let's use the drawn one and I'm going to turn off the placed one. So if we clear the placed branches and we just have that curve that we drew before. So we've got these two branches and I want to have more generations spawn off of this. When I wire this in here you can see that it's only spawning off of this last level that was created. This is where this branch on group setting is created here. You can say right here what you could do is you could actually say, well, I actually want to create these branches on the branch that I just created and the one before it. So you could actually override this branch group here and say, I want a branch on level zero and then it won't branch on this next generation. And you can say, I also want a branch on level one. And because of the assumptions that we're going to make when we When we build our rig, we're going to be making assumptions in our geo that says branch one, branch level one is only going to branch off of branch level zero. Branch level two is only going to branch off of branch level one. And that's sort of how the base rig is going to work. So that's why I'm going to avoid using branch on group features and tree branch places for now until we go over the more advanced example at the end of the course. I did want to let you know that those nodes are there because they're super cool and that those features are there this being able to decide which group you're branching on is really handy when you get into when you get into it. So, that's sort of the overview of all the main labs tree tools that we have. And now what I want to do is just kind of go through and build the hero tree that we're going to be using for our course. I'm going to actually get rid of this sphere and the curve and the tree branch, place, and all that stuff. I'm just going to delete those. We're going to just start off with, and I mentioned this before, but I actually like working personal preference, but you can feel free to use the lab's tree controller. I kind of just like working one node at a time. I'm going to just get rid of the tree controller itself, and I'm going to just start with the trunk by itself. And what I want to do is just modify the settings of the trunk to get the kind of thing that I'm looking for here. So I'm going to grab my tree trunk generator and just kind of go into adjusting some of the settings to get them the way along. The main one is with the roots. I'm going to just go to the trunk shape. I want to add some roots to the trunk. I'm going to reduce the partial twists back to their default setting, maybe even a little bit less. Let's do something like 100. I just wanted to stop real quick and ask if anybody had any questions regarding the main overview of the lab street tools. I know I kind of blasted through a bunch of that stuff and it's a ton of information, but it is, you know, I just kind of had to get through it, you know. I'm trying to look for my chat book here. Here we go. I think we're good. Cool. All right, so let's actually get into art directing this tree and get it looked the way that we want. I'm gonna let's just move this over here and this over here. Cool. So I want to adjust the noise. I'm going to go into the line noise settings And I'm going to actually, let's just increase the, and what I want to do is actually have a really like kind of a gnarly looking trunk with a lot of character towards the top. So I'm actually going to do my thing, which is disable my secondary noise for a second so I can really see what that first noise is doing. And I'm going to decrease the frequency quite a bit. So let's just decrease the frequency to about 0.2 and increase the intensity to be really high. So we start to get larger shapes in larger character inside of our tree. I'll set the intensity of value of like 0.8. You can kind of see that that trunk is kind of moving in a much more, yeah, I don't know, it's just got a lot more character to it. And then the second thing I want to do is just add a little bit of that secondary noise to gnarlet up a little bit. So I'll maybe bring that secondary noise intensity back up to one, and then maybe just drop the frequency down a little bit. I'll just drop the frequency down to say 0.5. So you can see it's just adding just a little touch of gnarliness to that tree. The next thing that I wanted to do was I'm going to just set the resolution by default, the resolution defaults here, I'm going to, let's say, increase the divisions around it to like a value of 0.8. So just it's kind of keeping its resolution going up the tree, but I'm just kind of reducing some of the resolution around the bottom. Honestly, this is just more or less for performance reasons. I would in the end probably want to keep things higher res. I just don't want to have too much geo to be dealing with during this. So the next thing I want to do is I'm just going to grab a copy of our tree branch generator here and slide it over. And we're just going to wire this one in. Now I think that this tree branch generator should be pretty close to the default other than the fact that we changed the detangling feature, which I am going to leave off. So we can just kind of focus on the placement of our tree branches on the second generation first. I'm going to reduce the resolution. So I'm going to increase this number to 0.4 and also kind of increase the divisions to 0.8. So that just reduces the poly count on the tree branches. And then I want to get into, let's go to the general tab. And I'm going to just increase the number of branches to something like 10. And the other thing I wanted to do was enable a little bit of tropism. So in the tropism settings, I'm going to enable bend along parent and just dial this value way down to like negative, let's say negative 0.05. So we kind of get just a little bit of that branch curvature, you know, coming up along the trunk like so. And then the branches are looking very straight. So I want to add a little bit of noise to them. Let's go to the line noise. I'm gonna enable line noise. And I'm gonna do my thing, which is just gonna turn off the secondary noise for a second by setting that intensity to zero. So I can really dial in this first main noise. And I'm gonna reduce the frequency. So we get like another thing, like similar to like what we did with the trunk below. I want to get these branches to have some larger movements, some larger character to them. So I'm going to decrease the frequency to about 0.3 and then just increase this intensity to something like four. And you can kind of see those branches have a lot more kind of character to them. And then just to add additional gnarliness to it, I'm going to add a higher frequency noise. So I'm going to increase the intensity of the secondary noise right here and then increase the frequency a little bit. And that just adds a little bit of, so a little bit of movement to those branches that feels nice. So let's say for an intensity value, let's 2.5 and a frequency value of 1.9. Looks like it's pretty good to me. And now once I kind of get my branch settings the way I like them, I'll just kind of option drag them down and apply them to the next generation and see how things look. So taking those settings that we just did on that first generation and applying to the second generation, it's looking pretty good. So a couple of tweaks I'd wanna make. I think I might wanna prune a little bit to keep branches like this from poking into the ground. So I'm going to hop down to the pruning settings in the general tabs under prune. I'm just going to prune up the downward facing angle to something like, let's say point, say 60 degrees seems to be good to me. Cause I like, I still like these branches coming off horizontal and stuff. I just don't want them pointing so much down. So that's good with that. I'm sorry, I'm just gonna, I just got to refer to my notes a little bit. So if I'm looking off to the side, that's sort of what I'm doing here. Just want to make sure. All good. Cool. The next thing is I've noticed that the branches kind of feel like they're really keeping their length towards the end of their child branches. And I kind of want to reduce that a little bit. So that was back on the placement tab. We can just grab this last knot of the length ramp and kind of dial it down a little bit. So there's a few knots that are kind of stacked on top of each other at the end here. I'm going to kind of just remove all of those. So I just have one that I'm working with here. And if I pull this down and just get that slider, I can get the branches to kind of be shorter as they get closer to the tips of their parent branch. And I think I'll leave the rest of the scattering settings looking good. I like the way all these angles. I just think that one of the issues that I'm kind of not liking is how when we get in really close to these branches, their mesh noise is way too intense. These branches are kind of getting fatter and thinner. I don't know if that's really apparent, but it just, I just want to reduce that. So I'm just going to go over to the noise setting in the mesh noise. And I'm going to decrease this intensity value. So it's not doing this, but it's doing something a little bit more predictable. Like a value of 0.1, I thought was good enough for this example. So that's looking pretty good so far. And the next thing I'm going to do is just copy this out and do another generation. I'm just basing this generation of what I did on the previous generation. I liked what I did here. I'm just gonna copy it and just wire it in and see how lucky I get and make adjustments from there. So now on this one, things are looking a little wispy and crazy, but I think it could work. It's gonna kind of set, take a look at some of these settings that I have here. I know on this one, because these branches are getting a lot smaller, I could reduce this resolution even more if I wanted to, but I think that it's fine for right now. And, you know, I think that this is looking pretty good. So I think I might just move on and create one final generation before we throw down our branches just so that I can kind of get a feel for, you know, I might do actually on this one, I'll just go to the general tab and just maybe make them a little bit shorter towards the end. So I'm just taking this length ramp and just dialing it slightly down. So those branches are a little bit shorter as they get to the end of their thing. So on this last generation, I'm going to actually have a different branching generation. So this is actually what I think is like the, this is going to be the branching generation that comes right before where we add our leaves. And one thing I wanted to do was to have them branch out at that 180 degree pattern like we were talking about before. So let's just option drag this out. And this is going to get a little bit heavy at this point, but it's all good. It'll, it'll be worth it in the end. This is going to be super heavy because I didn't reduce the number of the number of scatters on this level. So things are looking, it's looking like a, like a total rat's nest here. But what I'll do is get in here and just reduce the branch nodes down to something like three. So that'll significantly reduce the number of branches that were generated on our previous generation. I'm just going to kind of zoom into one of these branch ends over here. So I wanted to use the 180 degree branching pattern. I also want to reduce the noise. I'm just going to disable line and mesh noise for this so that I really just get straight twigs sticking out. It'll make things a little bit easier to see. But I can see my three branch generations right here on this branch. And if I just switch this over to the General tab and say opposite, we get branches that sort of spawning off at opposite angles from one another. And those will sort of be the branches that we'll add our leaves to. I kind of like, I just like the way that this looked for my final generation of branches. I mean, obviously, everything's pretty low poly right now. And you may want to manage that when we're getting into the animation portion of it, it'll make things go a lot faster if it's lower poly. But, you know, in the end, you're likely going to be able to crank the resolution up on a lot of these lower generation branches to add extra detail to your tree. And it should all just function fine. But for right now, I'm just going to leave it the way it is. And now we can add our leaves. So let's grab a tree leaf generator. I'm just going to grab the one that we were using before. And there's option drag that over and wire this in like so. And you can see that by default it's putting all of those cards that come with the Tree Leaf Generator onto our tree. And I want to, let's see, on the Tree Leaf Generator, what I want to do is actually, because we're not, I'm not going to be using the cards that they provide, I want to actually provide our own cards. So now we're going to actually kind of get into how we can set up the materials, because The materials are really tied to how these leaves work. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna back on out and we're gonna create our basic redshift settings to start doing our rendering here. So I'm gonna just hop up here to the object level and I'm just gonna throw it on a CycWall, call it grid. Or I'm gonna throw it on a grid that is going to be our CycWall and I'm just gonna dive inside of that. I'm also going to choose a camera angle pointing down the positive z axis. So if you look at my nomen in the corner, my x axis is pointing off to the right. And so I'm going to pick a camera angle kind of like this and control click on my camera. And maybe just pull it back a little bit and maybe up something like that just kind of frame up our tree. And then I'm going to untick the lock so that my camera is sort of locked in space there like so. And then I'm going to dive into the grid and sort of make it a cyc wall with respect to the view that we have. So real quick, let's just increase the size of the wall to a thousand by a thousand. That's a hundred. I'm just going to add an extra zero, a thousand by a thousand and then throw it on a bend. And why are that in here? And then I want it to capture, I want it to bend in the opposite direction since our camera's over here. So I'm just going to switch over my capture direction to negative one. And then I'll maybe move my capture origin in the negative z direction a little bit so that it's not bending the ground right near our tree. But I'll increase that a little bit and maybe increase the capture length a bit so that that slips a little bit more gradual. And then I'll just add more resolution to our grid by just making it 100 rows and 100 columns. So when we hop back into our camera now, we should have a nice cyc wall behind our tree. And I'm going to throw down a, I'm gonna actually add a render view over here. So I'm just gonna pop that up real quick and hit the alt bright bracket to split that view. And then I'll right click on this tab and then choose redshift render view. And I'm gonna just fire off one real quick to see what we've got so far. It should just be very boring gray dark tree. I'm gonna throw down a on my redshift shelf. I'm gonna use the redshift light sun. And that should, did that? Oh, it didn't come in because I have to hit enter. So there that is. And let's just turn the rendering out again. Everything's like very blown out white, so that's looking promising. I'm just going to change the angle, so I'm just kind of focusing on the shadow of the tree right now. I'm just going to change this rotation angle to 60 so that we kind of have more of an angled shadow there. And the only other thing I wanted to change on the light was the sun disc scale just to increase that to five so that it softens up this shadow a little bit. not really important, but just figured it looked nice. And now we can get into making our leaves and our materials. So I'm gonna actually split my view up into the quad view that I like to use for a lot of things. So it's gonna be two network parameter view prepared things. So I'm gonna, over here, I'm gonna alt right bracket to create another network view here. I'm gonna alt right bracket to create another parameter view here. I want my parameters to be up here though. So I'm gonna say alt three on this view. And then I'm going to hover my mouse over here and say Alt2 on this view. So that gives us a network view down here and a parameter view up here. And then I'm going to just tie this one to link one, link one and link two and link two. And so these two separate networks are going to be paired up with their respective parameter views above. And so we're making materials. I'm going to hop into the map context. So let's hop in here. And I'm going to throw in an RS material builder. And this we'll call this the trunk texture. Or this will actually be the trunk and branches. I'll just say branches. And if I jump in here, we've got our material. I want to apply this to our tree, but I want to apply two different materials. So I'm going to jump into the tree, and we're actually going to split off right now. So what we can do with our leaf generator and with our trunk generator is we can actually, one of the settings on the leaf generator and the branch generators will allow us to isolate the geo. So in here, you see this option that says delete previous levels. We can actually click that. And you can see that we only have our leaves left behind. So we can actually kind of break off a geo stream for our leaves and a separate one for just our branches and trunk. So from here, what we can do is throw it on our material and we'll apply a material to these branches and we'll just option drag that over and copy it and apply another material to these leaves and then I'll just merge them together. And throw it on a null. And this will be our tree. Tree. So on this material, we're just going to work on the branches first. I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer and control click to create another camera here so that I can kind of see what I'm doing with my branch material. Now, the materials that I had mentioned at the beginning of the lesson. I'm just going to kind of copy them into my project directory. So I'm just going to pull up my windows here. I've got this, which is my working project, this lesson one recording file that we're working with. And then this is my other project file that has my Maple Leaf and Oak Bark textures. You can see that Maple Leaf is here with all these different maps. And the Oak Bark is here with all these different maps. And I've placed it into a text folder. So I'm just I'm just going to create a text folder here. And I'm going to jump inside and just grab that Maple Leaf and Oak Bark texture and copy them and paste them in here. So I got those where they need to be. And let's just start building out a very basic material for our branches. This is obviously not a rendering course, but I just want to get things going with that so it looks at least somewhat plausible. then you can all feel free to take this to the maximum level rendering texture quality that you would like. But for our purposes, it's going to be pretty basic. So let's just start on an RS texture and grab the Albedo material under this. We'll jump in the text folder into the oak bark texture and grab the Albedo and we'll wire this into the diffuse color. I'm just going to expand the base properties out a little bit. So now if I click render, I should see the option to select camera 2 here. I don't see it applied. I got to apply it to this material right here. So on the material node inside of where we're building our tree, I'm just going to select the branches, hit accept, and we can start to see that color appearing, it is really glossy and so we need to definitely get our roughness map in there so I'm going to option drag the texture sampler down and grab the roughness. and just wire that into the reflection roughness. That kind of makes things less glossy. And then I'm going to do something. I'm not even going to do a displacement with this. I'm just going to do a bump apply a bump map for the bar texture to just give it a little bit of shading. So I'm just going to option drag this down and grab the height map and hit accept. And I'm going to maybe spin. I'm going to spin that material up. so it's kind of closed off, but thrown on a bump. And I'm just going to wire this into the input and then wire this into the redshift material bump map. And you can see we get that kind of bark look going on with our tree. So that's a good starting point. And from here, you obviously can, you know, get involved with doing all sorts of displacement and making things really, really fancy. Right. Just dial that height scale down by down to maybe 0.2, just to make it a little less intense. Nice. So now that we've got that, the branch texture kind of created, I want to create the leaf texture, but this is kind of where we're going to get into generating our own leaf geo. So I'm just going to hop back out to where we're building our network here. And I've got all these other nodes from the initial demo. I'm just going to delete those. And we're going to build our leaf, we're going to build our leaf based off of those atlases that we had downloaded. But in order to do that, we need a grid to kind of place them on. So we're going to manually, this is sort of the process, you would manually create a leaf. I'm going to just, for our example, throw in our grid. And I'm going to keep it kind of in the same size as what the simple leaf generator was doing, kind of on a one, like a normalized one to one scale. So let's just grab the size of our grid and set it to one by one. So it's a lot smaller down here. And then I'm going I'm going to just change the rows and columns to a two by two. So it's really just one poly here. I'm just going to say hide other objects real quick. So we've just got one poly here and I want to apply a UV quick shade and then use the UV quick shade to kind of crop in on the leaf that we want to use for our texture. So we're going to throw it on a UV quick shade and the texture that I want to choose for our leaf is in the leaf textures folder. We're just going to go to the maple leaf folder and choose that albedo. And you can kind of see that we get a default UV mapping for our leaves like so. And I wanna just grab this one in the corner. We're just gonna work with this one right here. And so what I could do is, you know, I thought maybe what I could do is just grab the vertices of this polygon and kind of crop in on it. So if you grab the grid and we switch to point selection mode, so I'm just hitting the S key and then tapping this little, you know, icon up here and just grab this with the actual UV quickshade visible, grabbing this grid node and then selecting this point and hitting the T key, I can start to drag this around. And you can see that because I'm generating the UVs on the UV quickshade after I'm making this edit, I can just hit S and T. S and T on this one. See now, now things are getting messed up. So UV quickshade is trying to guess what dimensions it's projecting onto this polygon, and it doesn't know. Because we're changing it, and so it's not allowing us to really crop in on that leaf. So what I do at this point is I just supply my own UVs. So we're just going to say, I'm just going to hop back up to the, I'm going to disable this edit, hop back up to the grid, and throw it on a UV project. And wire that in like so. And this is going to be, we're just going to initialize this to the best plane. So initialize to best plane, say initialize. And because this grid isn't modified, the UV is going to be projecting down along the Y axis and like totally just lined up the way we want it. But then the cool thing is that if we turn on our edit, we're still getting the same issues, but if we move our edit to before the UV project, since we've got those settings from our perfectly laid out grid, we can actually move these vertices around with our edit and not have it cause any problems. So we can perfectly crop in on our leaf like this. So I'm just gonna hit the S key, grab this point and hit the T key and grab this little planar slider and just move it around so we can grab that. And I'm just gonna also grab this one right here and move, scooch it over a little bit because it looks like it was kind of getting into the section of the map that's cause it to start to repeat. But here we've got our one leaf sort of cropped in on. Next thing I wanna do is just place it and normalize it along this. Place it on the Z-axis for cloning purposes or scattering purposes and make it about the size of one so that when we're controlling our values on our leaf generator, we know that the size that we're determining is somewhat predictable. So let's throw down a match size. You know what, match size. And why are that in here? And let's just justify z to the minimum. So that's gonna kind of put our polygon right there at the origin. And what is the other thing we wanted to do? Oh yeah, we wanted to scale it to fit a size of about one. So it's somewhat normalized, more predictable for us. And then if I throw UV quickshade back on, there's just one other issue we gotta solve for. And it's that even though we've put this at the origin, the stem is still kind of slightly off of our origin. So I'm gonna just modify where that stem is thrown on a transform. And if I grab that transform, if I select the transform while the UV quickshade is visible, this makes it a little bit easier to deal with, but I'm gonna grab my manipulator and hit the insert key to move into pivot position mode and just position my pivot right there on the tip of that leaf. So that's good. I'm gonna hit the insert key again to go back to normal moving mode. And I'm just going to right click and copy the pivot transform that we just set right here in this parameter. So right click copy parameter, go to translate and say paste relative reference. And it moves it a little bit more in the wrong direction. We just gotta put a minus sign in front of each one of these parameters. So in Y we put a minus sign before, In Z, we put a minus sign for it. And now that pivot that we selected has got our leaf stem perfectly locked on the origin. The other thing that I wanted to do to this geo is just to apply a little bit of a bend to it. I wanted the leaf to actually kind of bend a little bit like the simple leaf did. So if we look at the simple leaf, simple leaf is about the same size, but it's got this nice shape to it. So I'm just gonna throw it on a bend here. And the bend by default isn't going to work too great. It's just going to actually rotate the geo. We just need to supply some more geometry here. So right above the bend, put on a subdivide and give it a couple of divisions. Let's just say a subdivide depth of two and let's bend it by, let's see negative 60. Just to keep that nice and bent like so. And, you know, we look at this kind of looks, you know, it's starting to look like a leaf other than the fact that it's got all this bordering texture around it. But we have an alpha channel with our atlas and it's going to work great. We'll plug it into our texture and we'll do that right now. So let's go back over here to the material builder, and we can build our leaf texture. So let's say RS material builder. And we'll say leaf. And we're just going to hop inside here. Oh, I wanted to obviously wire this into my actual, I wanted to wire this into the leaf generator to actually show that we're going to place it on our tree. just wire that into this third input right here and then if I go to the Tree Leap Generator and hit space bar F and wire in the UV quickshade, you can kind of get a preview that we have placed our own leaf geo on all of those branches. But we just don't need to apply this sort of visualization texture. We need to actually create a texture for our leaf. So with the leaf material selected, the material node selected over here, I'm going to just select from our list. I'm going to select the leaf material that we just created and hit accept. And then let's start throwing in our maps. So I'm going to throw down a texture, redshift texture, and wire this into the diffuse color. This is going to be the albedo texture for our maple leaf. So I'll be done. Grab that. And I'm going to option drag this down. And I'm going to select the alpha channel because we need that to get our opacity. So I'm going to wire this into the overall opacity color section. And then I'm going to option drag it down and we're going to select our the only I can't remember which maps I'm using for this one sec. I'm going to be using the I think it's the yeah We're using roughness and so we'll get the roughness map here and the translucency map, which is a cool map. It will allow us to sort of fake the fake like a sort of sort of subsurface look for our lead so I'm going to grab the Translucency map right here. Except, yeah, I'm going to before I forget what I'm doing here. Let's wire this roughness into the base properties reflection roughness. The texture, the translucency is going to go into base properties, translucency color. I'm just going to expand this out so I can see where these wires are going a little bit better. And let's see the other thing I needed was the bump map I'm just going to do a bump map for the leaves as well so we just need to option drag this down and get the height file and wire this into a bump. and wire that bump into the bump map of the output. So now if I get my camera two, which is our camera for kind of previewing close up stuff, I'm just gonna lock it and fly into a little chunk of leaves like this one right here and just hit the fire off render and see where we're at. I think by default the, I think by default the actual roughness is way too intense. These leaves look very dark. I'm going to go down to, or it's not the roughness, it's the bump map. The bump map is crazy. Let's dial this back to value of.02. And that's looking a little bit better. And the translucency, we've added the translucency color map in there, but I just want to add a little bit of weight to it. So if I increase the weight to one, those leaves will really start to kind of pop in that sunlight and start to feel like they're more alive. And when I came back to my other view, so go back to camera view one, for whatever reason, from this angle, I felt like I wanted to push the translucent even further, which, you know, it's probably not the most realistic, but I pushed it to a value of two and kind of like the way it looked. It just felt very saturated and stylized, I guess, almost to me, I don't know, maybe the leaves are thinner or greener or whatever. So I just kind of did it that way. And so now it's gonna turn the rendering, the IPR off off and just get my tree highlighted down here and fire this off one last time and we should have the beginnings of what we're going to be using for our tree for the rest of the course. And that is it. So this is awesome. Hey, we did it just just in the nick of time. Yeah. Yeah, so I would say, you know, for, does anybody have any questions at this point about anything or any questions anyone. I see we got one here about preparing the tree for an atlas in a similar way. I'm not sure. You mean like MIP, what is it called, MIPMAP? Or like, you can talk, Peter. We can have a conversation. Yeah, I was just curious. It's very impressive to get the kind of texturing for the leaves. I was wondering if it's possible to get the same sort of workflow or a look for the tree if that's possible. If that's possible. Are you so are you talking about like using cards for your branches or like using your own custom geo for branches and stuff like that. Just the texture. Like if I went to make a scam. Could I prepare the tree with like a quick shading project and lay it out similarly as you did to the leaves. Yeah, you might be able to I haven't really I never thought of that that might be an option I know I'm inside of the inside of the tree. So all of these trees, all these tree branches, they have groups associated with their levels. So I know that if you wanted to apply different materials on a per branching level basis, you could use these primitive groups to kind of isolate your tree like branch branching levels to kind of adjust that. I'm not I'm not sure entirely how much control you have over the individual branches themselves and kind of being able to like UV map them individually I'm guessing that each tree is sort of each branch is sort of UV map on its own let me just hop up to the second generation. And I'm going to hop out of my locked view. And I'll just frame that up and let's hit space bar five. So, it looks like. It looks like the branches are spanning multiple UV spaces, I believe. So that's probably why we get the repetition that we do along the branch. It's not just like one stretched out bark texture, but it does have some sort of repetition. So it is repeating the pattern as it goes through. So look at the tree trunk. Yeah, you can see that the tree trunk itself has a couple maps that are placed. know, this is probably the end caps right here, but then the whole tree trunk is actually spanning off multiple UV spaces. So I'm not multiple lengths of the UV space. So I'm not exactly sure how you would do that. I mean, ultimately, you probably could modify the way these UVs are constructed somehow. I'm sure inside it's a sweep node that's kind of generating it. And I know that the sweep node gives you a little bit more control over how the UVs are constructed, but I don't know offhand per se. Yeah, for sure. Any other questions anybody. I've got a question. Obviously, I think you would, but if you wanted to render a few of these, I assume you'd want to bake it down, export it as some object format and then just load and render that. Yes, I was experimenting around with this and I would render this whole thing out as a redshift proxy and then instance those on a scene. And this is like super, I have an example of it, but it's a work in progress that I'm not really allowed to share. But I created one pine tree using atlases from mega scans for the pine needles and stuff like that and using the bark texture from mega scans. And I was able to get thousands of these in redshift scene using redshift proxies. So it's really cool. And another thing that is also kind of cool about it, and we just switch back to my normal view here, is that these, if I just temporarily wire in the lab's tree controller real quick, you can see that, well, these are all kind of overrides, but you've got randomization control. I forgot to mention that. So you've got a randomization control that you can, you can, like, if you were to wedge this out in tops, you could just select a different randomized node and it's gonna take a second to cook, but then you're getting totally unique trees And that randomization parameter is on, if I disconnect this, that randomization parameter is on all of these, on all of these levels, I think we've got, it looks like if I select this one, I see that it looks like the randomize is turned off on this one. You have to select randomized length, I believe. And then it goes on. Oh, this one does. Yeah, I'm talking about the, Oh, because it's a trunk, it doesn't have anything to, because it's a trunk, yeah, this is randomizing the length. So I guess, I don't know if it's possible for you to make more trunks, but this will allow you to randomize that trunk length. There you go, yeah, that's exactly it. So you can randomize your trunk length here, and then on your tree branches, there's also a randomized here. So you could theoretically just send this through PDG and wedge out like as many trees as you want, and then all of those randomization, just have the PDG just wedge all of those randomization parameters and just generate tons of unique trees. I don't know how many of those you could do before you break a giant instancing setup, but I do know that kicking this out as a redshift proxy works fantastically. That's so cool. So you basically bake it out, I mean, write it out and then bring it in as a proxy and it's like a shader that is being instanced. Yes, totally. So like I would just, you know, know, because we've got a rendering of it working right here, like this tree is actually rendering correctly if I need to reset my settings but in the out context, I would just create a RS proxy. Redshift proxy output. And then just say on the archive here, the stop path, I would just grab this tree, throw it in there. And then I could write this out to disk and then scatter it onto points using some sort of a redshift instancing path attribute and you would have thousands and thousands of trees. It's just redshift's instancing capabilities are like really, really seem really stable and they will really fast. I was shocked how many pollies I hadn't that seen if you really got down to it. Like you were to add up how many pollies were on all those trees and how many thousands of them we hadn't seen. It was like, whoa, like really, really, really nuts. What about packing and instancing? I mean, if it's packed, isn't it essentially the same thing? I know that like, I haven't tried to do it in a while, but I know that I know that there's like a slight difference between the way Houdini's native pack instancing works and the way redshift does. My experience like way in the past, like many versions of redshift ago was that the redshift proxies are super stable and loaded super fast and if you can do it that way you should. But things may have changed by now. It might be the same. It might be a total wash. I don't know for sure at this point whether they're or really whether there's that much of a difference anymore. And the proxies be animated? Yes, you can totally animate these proxies. So like what you could do is after this proxy, after we create our animation for a sec, we could pipe this in here and kick out a file for each of the hundred frames of our growth animation. And then if you were able to instance that growth animation onto all of your different points and just provide a frame number that each point should look up into, you could get a really beautifully offset animated growth pattern for all of those proxies. And from what I've seen, you would think like, okay, if you have a hundred frames, that's a hundred different proxies. And if they're all time offset from one another, that's redshift loading over a hundred different trees. you might run into a performance issue where it's unpacking because if it's unpacking one instance of a still frame of a tree then you're golden because this is just one tree. But when you start if you have a very long animation with lots of offsetting then you're loading potentially hundreds of different versions of the same tree and that might lead to a situation where performance might chug a little bit but from what I've seen it actually does a great job with all that stuff too. I mean it's just a matter of pushing it as far as you can until it breaks but yes adding animation on as a frame attribute that looks up into a directory and chooses which redshift proxy file that grab and throw into your scene, it totally works. We were doing a project that involved a bunch of floral blooms around a person and the shot never ended up getting used, but we had used methods similar to this where we had rigged a bunch of flowers and we built a blooming animation for each flower and then we had an attribute kind of trigger the beginning of when that animation should start on an instancing setup that looked up on disk, which frame of the animation to play and when, and you get this nice cascading effect of flowers that are kind of growing in a trail, one after another. It's like extremely powerful how the instancing setup works. It's just the only downside is it can be really kind of a pain to set up because it involves you writing out instance file attributes, modifying instance file attributes and like tweaking with like frame numbers and figuring out how that triggering offset stuff works. That can be a little bit tricky, but it's totally doable. That's really exciting. Yeah, I mean, I would say like, if you had a 60 frame animation of a wind system blowing through these trees and you wanted to like select a, and it was looping for whatever reason, and you wanted to select a random offset, you could probably get away with having thousands of them still and seen, even though it's picking one frame of 60 different frames of that animation. It's really, it's pretty insane how much, how the instancing works. And I, you know, I do want to get more into karma and USD and figuring out how those work for those work. But I haven't had a chance to fully adopt it yet just because of working in like a production scenario at a studio where everyone's using Redshift. Yeah, I mean, do you personally even need to learn as a teacher? I do because I want to use free tools like what's native in Houdini. So I have to learn and yeah, but that was kind of like one of the reasons why I didn't want to get too heavy into the rendering for this is because I know not everybody has Redshift. That's okay. A lot of people do. Yeah. Hopefully the, hopefully the material setup is basic enough that anyone be able to, anyone who knows how to apply materials should be able to do it. The concepts are so similar and we do have a question about exporting to Unreal. I think because Unreal has its own shading, right? Unless you would bake everything onto the tree. I am not sure. Yeah, any Unreal people here that could, I mean, I know there's a way because there's always a way. There is. And I think that a lot of these tools are originally, like the labs, the labs tools themselves used to be called the game dev tool set. So I think that a lot of the intent behind a lot of these things is to generate stuff, you know, for games. Right. And, and because of Houdini engine, you should be, I wonder if you just bring the lab, the tree tool, literally straight in as a HDA. Make a giant HDA out of it with the randomization parameter on there and just have it be like, boom, different tree. Like, yeah, wrap it all up, put it into Unreal. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, that's amazing. Homework for someone. Bring it next week. Yeah, you can even bring in like PDG into the HDA and like bring the whole setup. as the HDA inside Unreal and randomize all the trees. It's your assignment now. Why speak always at the wrong moment. Yeah, exactly. You did it to yourself. You did it to yourself. Now, this is super exciting. Any other questions from anybody? Did the stream work out better after? Oh, yeah. It was like, yeah. And don't worry about, you know, the beginning. These are live classes. So that's part of the fun. Is that little things like that happen? Yeah. So no, you did great and you're such a good public speaker. Wow. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, you're a natural for sure. The pacing is great. Yeah, really good. Really, really good. Okay, cool. Yeah, my wife told me last night that I was was going a little fast, but I don't think she I was. Is she a Houdini artist? Your wife? No, I was asking her. I'm like, do you want a laptop? You can follow along. You know, and she's like, no, I've never even touched Houdini before. Yeah. No, she, yeah, 3D isn't necessarily her thing. She does like, she does do some graphics work, though, with making shirts and stuff like that. OK, that's cool. Yeah, this is so design-y. And I think the pacing was perfect. And also we have the videos, so people can always go back. And it's very playful. Was anyone following along as he was teaching? I made it to where I didn't have the textures. That's pretty good. I actually rendered the full tree. Oh, of course he did. Oh, man. Nice. What a showoff. Very fun to see Mark in person, because I actually started learning Houdini back when I was learning from Stop Being Afraid of Houdini. That's excellent. Yeah. Yeah, Mark has a lot of tutorials out. So, and yeah, if anyone did follow along, please post in the actual channel for this class, because we'd love to see what you did. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to see people actually make stuff. I mean, if you have time, I know everyone's busy, But it's so fun to see everyone's work. And I haven't been strict with homework. As if it's totally optional. But that's how you learn. This is just the first part of learning. And the real meat of learning happens when you practice. So yeah, thank you so much, Mark. Any last minute questions before we say goodbye? No? Thank you all so much for checking it out. And there was a thrill ride. Yeah, right? I'm glad the internet ended up working out okay. And I will make sure that I can hard line next week without any license issues. It worked out perfectly. And thank you so much for teaching live to all of us. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I know it's a little heartbreaking. Super cool. Thank you so much, Mark. Yeah, thanks so much. And have a great day, everyone. Thank you next week. Thank you. Bye. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye",
+  "segments": [
+    {
+      "text": " And Mark, take it away. Let's see, Mark, where did you go? Can you hear me? Oh, now I can. Yeah, I had sort of some network dropout going on during this. No problem. So I really think my name is Mark Fincher. I'm currently a senior motion designer at a motion design studio called already been chewed and I've just been kind of working my way through computer graphics for the last, you know, decade plus and eventually found myself falling in love with Houdini and really just this is what I kind of do full time so I'm sort of one of several Houdini artists here in the Dallas area that work at already been chewed and I kind of am sort of like the I do kind of like a lot of the, you know, visual effects, knitting, explosions, kind of destruction stuff for various like shoe spots and stuff like that. Basically shoes and watches and other, you know, things like that. So that's sort of, that's sort of my background. Am I coming, is my feet okay right now? It was a little choppy in the beginning for your bio, but it's okay. Let's keep going with the lesson and then we'll let you know. Okay, cool. If it does come down to it, I'll throw in that network cable and hopefully that'll cure things. But I'm just going to move my thing over here and switch over to share screen mode. And this is the Houdini project file that we're going to be working on today. So welcome to the, what is, what did we call this course it was the procedural growth with kin effects and the lab street tools with with Houdini school. Today, we're going to be creating something that looks a lot like this. Ultimately, the goal of this course, we're going to be working towards an animation that will be a growth animation for these trees and then we'll actually like create kind of a wind system that is driven in sops that kind of mimics the flutter of leaves and the bending of branches as wind blows through it. But today we're really just going to wind up with something like this. We're just kind of focused on the lab street tools themselves and how we can use them to just model a. A pretty basic starting point for us for this lesson. And we will be sort of kind of building this. But also I'll kind of go over more or less all of the features of the lab street tools that are going to be relevant to us and to you if you're looking to kind of make your own type of tree. So I'm going to just scoot this over off to the side here. And so I can reference it and then I also wanted to kind of show this this is this kind of gives a closer view of the wind system that we're going to kind of build. So this is, you can see what we're going to be doing. This growth is going to happen. And the flutter and then the flutter of these leaves kind of increases as the wind blows through them and stuff like that. So it's kind of inspired by my looking at speed tree. For a project, we were researching speed tree and really found it to be like such a powerful system. And the lab street tools is very close to, the lab street tools work very closely, very much like speed tree in a lot of ways. So I, in diving through them, was able to kind of work with them and discover how powerful they were. And so we're gonna kind of go over those now. But the other thing I wanted to mention was that I will be using a couple textures for this course. So those textures are, if you are on the course page here, if you're looking at the syllabus and you scroll down during, into the what you need to take this course section, you hit read more, and there was these two textures here, the maple leaf texture and the oak bark texture. Really these textures, you can use whatever textures you want. I have them up right here. I think I have this one. Let me get the maple leaf one up here. I'm going to also be using, so I'm going to be using these two textures, but really any texture you want to use is fine for this. You know, if you want to find your own leaf atlas and your own trunk texture or branch texture, anything's good. I just needed to have something. So these are free textures off of texture.com and you can find those in the links on the actual, on the course page. So I'll be using these. But yeah, and I'm also going to be working in redshift. But generally, since this course isn't mostly focused on rendering per se, it's really focused on like the tools themselves and how to build a tree. I think most of us probably know how to make a good looking rendering. And I'm not going to dwell too much on it, but I don't want to leave you stranded trying to figure out how to get an atlas stuck onto a tree. I mean, we don't want to have we just want to pick out one one or two of those leaves and attach them to our tree. And I want to kind of get you all started in the right direction with rendering, even though we're not going to be doing like really intense rendering for this course. So I'm assuming that if redshift isn't your thing, that you're probably able to apply materials and whatever render engine of your choice, we're not going to be going that heavy into it. Cool. So with that out of the way, let's get into the actual looking at of these tools. So I do have a lesson over here by the way on the course page that will explain how to install the SideFX Labs tools if you don't already have them. And since I didn't wanna mess around with my system and installing and uninstalling the SideFX Labs tools during a live session, I pre-recorded that. So that's there for you in case you need to determine whether you have the SideFX Labs tools or not. All right, so here we are with a blank scene and I'm gonna hop in and start making some trees. So I've got my, let's throw down a geo to get started. And I'm gonna just call this my tree and just gonna jump in there. And then I'm actually, because a lot of these parameters are pretty long, I'm gonna just split my view a different way. I'm just gonna pull down the Alt key and tap on this little bar in between here. So I've got my network view on the left and my parameters on the right, just cause they're very tall parameters to work with. So getting started right off the bat, I'm just gonna throw down a bunch of the trees, the tree tools, and then we can kind of like explore their parameters. So I'm just gonna start and I'll go and kind of show you where you can find them. In the labs section, I just hit the tab key and go to labs, world building, and then tree. And you can see you got your six labs tree tools here. So we're gonna be working mostly with the branch generator and the trunk generator and the leaf generator, but I'm also gonna start with the labs tree controller because this is going to give us a whole bunch of parameters that we can use to act as kind of a global and so they're going to behave. We got the labs tree controller, that's kind of the start. And then we want a trunk generator. You're gonna throw that down. I'm just gonna wire in the lab street controller into the right port on the trunk generator. This creates a controller input. And you can see that here, once I highlight this, we get a tree trunk. Now I'm just gonna throw it on a branch generator. And I'm going to wire this in as well. You can see that when I highlight this, it takes a second to cook, but we get our first generation of our tree branches. It's going to change my background to dark, make it a little bit more visible. Does that look okay to you guys? Everyone able to see that? Yes. Excellent. Okay, cool. Now, the first thing that I want to do before I start throwing down more generations is the resolution of this tree is pretty high right now, and it's also doing a Boolean operation where it's kind of merging these branches in with the trunk. And I want to kind of reduce that to make things perform a little bit better while we're doing this. So I'm going to just hop up to the tree controller. And I'm going to just switch over to we'll go over all these tabs, but first thing I want to do is switch to the meshing section. And here where it's doing Boolean and normal blending, I'm just gonna switch that to none. And you can see that instead of kind of cutting out the tree, it's just kind of sticking the branch into the side of the tree like that. Just, it's just a little bit less for, a little bit less to cook. And then, also over here on the resolution tab. Oh, Mark, actually, can you hear me? You are cutting out a little bit more than we were hoping for. So maybe maybe we should take that tiny bit of time to get your that fix that you were talking about. Yeah, let me go plug in real quick. I'll be right. Okay. So, so everyone, if you need to take apologies for this, if you need to take a little break that you weren't able to get, this is a good time. Yeah. Sorry about that. And it's, it's, it's sort of threw me through a curve, curve ball. I'll be back in one second. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't that bad like before we started. And then, do you guys agree, David? It was a little more than we were hoping for. Yeah, it started up. It kind of comes and goes. Yeah. Is my video usually this bad like this? That's usually how you guys see me with my awful internet. I was just wondering. This one was worse. Okay, so it wasn't just me. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure everything's smooth. I just wanted to make sure, is that how I was in my class? I'm just kind of... I don't think so. I don't think so, yeah. Maybe because everyone was sleeping when you were doing your class. And your whole country, everyone was sleeping. Oh yeah, my class, my time I think was like 11 PM or something. Yeah, I see. I've not. Yeah, just to clarify, sleeping because of the time difference. The class is awesome. Yeah, no, the class is awesome. That was not the actual class time. Okay, I am back. Can you see me? Okay. I can see you. How's your Houdini? Houdini is still working. So I've got four, I have four copies open. So I'm hoping that. Okay, let's do it guys. Thanks. Thanks everybody for your patience. Yeah, sorry about that. I just did a speed test and it's really fast. It's just, it was creating licensing issues. If you're joining us now. I was having licensing issues when I was plugged into the land and so now I'm just we're just going to roll with it. It's going to feel better so far. So far so good. Okay, excellent. Your video feed is better too. Great. Let me get my screen back going on here. Are you able to see that? Yes. Excellent. Okay. So where we were was I was just kind of optimizing some of the settings in the Tree Controller to make them behave a little bit better in terms of just reducing cook time so that we can kind of get through this demo faster without having to wait for the tree to cook so much. So one of the things that I just did under the meshing tab of the Tree controller was I just set the intersection behavior to none. And then the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to hop over to the resolution tab and increase the resolution, which you would think that an increased resolution would actually lead to higher resolution geometry, but in this case, I think it's more of a spacing value. So if I increase the resolution to from point one to point eight, you can see that it's, you know, we've got less sort of segments along our branches and then over here on divisions, and I'm going to increase that to point eight as well. that to point eight as well. You can see we've got a pretty low poly tree at this point, but it's going to make things kind of run a little bit faster for us while we're doing our work here. All right, I'm going to turn off wireframe mode and now let's kind of just throw down a couple more generations of this tree branch generator. So I'm just going to option drag this out and wire it in like so. So you kind of follow this down like you would with vellum. You've got two streams and one of them is creating the geo and the other one is actually generating an output for the underlying splines that drive the way that this tree is constructed. And these splines come with all sorts of attributes on them that we will be getting into when we build our rigs later. So we've got branch level, branch ID, we've got level groups for all of our primitives, for our branch levels and all that information we can use and make assumptions about when we're designing our rigging system to handle the animation of this tree later. I'm going to just throw down one more generator for this right now. I'm just option dragging and then wiring both of those in there. So now we've got quite a few branches on our tree and some of them are even like running into the ground which is kind of cool. I think that it's neat that it's smart enough to know that those those branches shouldn't go through the ground, but they kind of collide off of it. Then the other node that is really of concern is the leaf generator. So I'm just gonna throw it on a labs tree leaf generator. And again, these two streams on the left correspond to those two inputs that we've been following down. And if I highlight that, you can see that it places a bunch of cards for us on all of these branches. And that's sort of, you know, is, you know, kind of what we do normally is now we'd put a texture on these cards, but we're not going to get that to that until later. So what I'm going to use in the meantime is the tree simple leaf. So I throw in a labs tree simple leaf here this third port on the tree leaf generator allows you to kind of put in whatever type of geometry you want to supply to it and this tree leaf generator. if I just highlight it and zoom in. You can see it's just a very basic leaf. That's about one unit in size, so it's like a normalized scale. And we can just use this to visualize what our leaves look like. And it looks a little bit nicer than just some cards. So you can kind of see that we've got a bunch of little tiny leaves on our tree for right now. And so that was like a really quick overview of those like three or four main tools about how this works. And so for the first part, I'm going to just kind of go over how all these, parameters work here, and then we're going to work towards building a tree that looks like the tree in our example right here. So let's just back up. I'm going to go back up to the labs tree controller and maybe get the first generation of tree branches showing so we can kind of go over what some of these global settings are so this tree controller really is a way to kind of control all the features for all of the of your tree all at once. So if I switch over to the tropism tab, let's kind of learn about what these tropism features can do for us. So we've got a little bit of, you can see that gravitotropism is enabled right now. And tropism really describes like, it's a phenomenon of plants to kind of, I think it is like a influence in like how the direction of the way plants grow and bend. So really common one is gravitotropism. We can kind of just crank this value slider down and like it will determine how much, wilt these branches have as they're coming off of our geometry. And likewise, we can like, we could make that go negative and then they would kind of wilt up and grow up. Additionally, there is the bendalong parent. So I'm just disabling gravitotropism. That's, gravitotropism would be like, if you wanted to build a weeping willow where everything was kind of drooping over. Bendalong parent is similar in the sense that it causes what might look like a wilt, but it actually just causes the branches to adhere to the directionality of their parent. So right now they're all kind of going up because their only parent is the trunk, which is vertically oriented. But if I were to turn on the second level tree branch generator, you can see that these additional, that these child branches are also trying to adhere to the direction of the parent branch at the location where that branch is being connected to that, at the location where that branch is being connected to its parent branch. So that's sort of what bend-along parent tropeism does. The other one we've got is phototropism. And this is sort of one that you see a lot with with like flowers and they will, if you have a flower pot kind of, you know, in a window, it will, the flowers will tend to grow towards the sun. And so in this, here by default, the phototropism is in the, it's pointing in the positive, one in the positive X direction and one in the positive Y direction. So from the view that I currently have, that's up and to the right. So if I increase the strength, you can kind of see that it's influencing the growth of this tree towards or away that direction that you can specify here in the phototropism. And then lastly, we have the thigmatropism. And I kind of like to think of this as like almost like a vine system. If you wanna grow the tree and have it sort of adhere to a piece of geometry or have it appear to be influenced by a piece of geometry in your scene, you can plug some geo in here under your object here. So I'm just gonna create a sphere real quick. And I'm gonna grab the manipulator and kind of just maybe, you know, for demonstration purposes, just throw this sphere up here in these branches and then go and grab the tree controller and drag the sphere into object one of the thigmatropism. Now, if I template the sphere, you can see that all of these branches are sort of kind of giving it a little hug, you know? And there's kind of growing around that sphere adhering to it. So if you wanted to build like something like a vine system, you could probably use this stigmatropism to do that. We're not going to be doing that in this course, but I thought it was kind of cool to demonstrate. If I, you know, drag this around, you can see that it is receding quite a bit, but you do get that it sort of is attempting to grow around that sphere. Now, if I go and increase the strength beyond one, things start to grow into the inside of the sphere. You can see that kind of those branches starting to make their way into the sphere. And then if I decrease it, you can actually see that things are starting to get repelled. I could even go negative with this. And that is repelling the tree from growing into that sphere area. It's almost avoiding it. So you can kind of create some influence using regular geometry using the thymotropism. One other thing I just wanted to cover real quick is I'm just going to go back to the first generation here and turn back on on our tree controller, the bendalong parent, and you can see that all these tropisms give us a ramp, and that ramp more or less controls how much influence we have along the length of that branch. So if I were to kind of increase the strength of this, increase the strength of this bendalong parent, and then And then I can actually kind of ramp off how quickly that kicks in along the length of the branches that comes out of the tree, which is a really cool feature to have it's just very art directable to be able to control how these things behave you can almost kind of create like a little, a little angle in there a little although in those branches if you wanted to. that off for now. The next thing I want to do to kind of make this perform a little bit better, I'm now realizing is that on my tree branch generators, I have a, they have a detangling setting on where they try to avoid one another. I'm going to just turn that off real quick. So I'm just going to select my three tree branch generators and go to advanced and unclick detangle. That's just going to make things not have to kind of click through several iterations of trying to detangle themselves. It should perform a little bit better in that regard. All right, so back to the tree controller. We've covered the tropism tab. Let's now take a look at the noise tab. So the noise tab, we've got two different types of noise with our tree. We've got line noise and mesh noise. The line noise is actually applying noise to these underlying skeletons that are defining our tree branches. And so that will like actually, you know, affect the the overall curvature and shape of our branches. But then the other type of noise is mesh noise. And that actually affects how the surface of the geometry is noise depth. Now, when it's pretty low res like this, you can't see. So I might override the resolution a little bit to just for temporarily to kind of illustrate that. But what I want to do is just kind of demonstrate line noise first. So let's just go back to the tree controller and we'll look at line noise. You can see there's two noises in here. We've got primary and secondary. I like to do what I like to do and I'm trying to shape my tree is to kind of turn off the secondary temporarily by setting its intensity to zero. And then I'll go and look work, just kind of work on this primary noise here. So you can see if I increase the intensity, I can get some pretty gnarly looking branches out of that. And I can also adjust the frequency. It's typical noise settings that you would be used to. You can almost make lightning out of this tree generator if you wanted to probably. And, you know, it's got roughness and step size and all that. I'm going to just hit, I'm going to, I think it's control middle mouse on all these to kind of set them back to default. But you can kind of get an idea how that noise can be used to add some character to your, to your branches. And then the secondary noise, you can actually is just another noise of the same type that just added additional frequency on top of your noise. So if you wanted to, you could double up both of these noises on top of each other, and we will be doing that later. Just kind of wanted to show that first. So I'm just going to set those back to normal. And I'm just resetting my parameters to default by holding down control and middle mouse clicking on all of them just kind of set everything back to the baseline before I move on. Then under mesh noise, what I said, I was going to actually increase the resolution of our geometry real quick to look at that. So I'm just gonna go back to the resolution tab and I'm gonna control middle mouse on both the resolution and division. So we've got a little bit more resolution here. And you can already see some of the effects of that mesh noise on the geometry that we have here. So if I go back to the tree controller and go to the noise settings and the mesh noise tab, you can see that we've got this kind of, we've got this noise that we can sort of adjust actually on the tree itself, that might mimic something like bark. You can increase the frequency and just kind of add some sort of character to the surface that's generated by the tree, by our tree branch generators and trunk generators and stuff like that. So I'm going to just control click both of these to set them back to normal and then we'll move on to the next tab. So for the next thing, I'm actually going to switch meshing back, the resolution back up to a value of about 0.8 for the resolution and 0.8 for the divisions. to keep things a little bit more low poly. I'll be hopping back and forth between that resolution tab quite a bit probably just to keep things performing well. But if we go to the pruning settings, and I'm gonna actually go to the last generation of our tree branch generator, you can see that we've got a bunch of branches that are kind of pointing out in all different directions. And where the pruning controls come in handy is that we can actually kind of chop off branches that are facing in a direction we don't want. So for example, like if this tree branch is kind of pointing down, we don't want things really growing into the ground like that, this pruning will analyze what angle the branch is coming out at and kind of delete it for us. So if I just increase this downward facing angle slider right here, you can see that it starts to make the tree adhere to only keeping branches that are growing upwards. So that's a really handy control to have when you're trying to make your tree look little bit more natural. I think this looks pretty natural to me compared to what it was before where it's just kind of growing all over the place. But different plants grow in different ways and you can make any type of plant with the tree generator, I'm sure. So it's not exclusive to making just maple oak like trees like this, but you know some plants do grow in all different ways like that. So upward facing angle does the opposite of that. It just kind of trims the branches that are facing up. So that's pretty self explanatory and the directional angle. This next one down here, the directional angle is very similar to what we have before. So in the by default, it's going to trim in the z axis. So I'm just looking. So my z axis is pointing off to the right. And if I increase that directional angle, you can see that it is trimming off branches that are facing along that z axis. So we have additional control there. And then this second setting is more or less the same settings for all of these branches, except it's going to analyze the end angle. So the upward-facing angle and downward-facing angle and directional angles are all determined by what the end point of each branch is as opposed to its root. So before we were kind of analyzing the initial angle as a branch comes off of the tree like so, so this first branch right here, we would be sort of analyzing this angle right here. But depending on some of your noise and tropism settings, you might have a different angle at the tip. And that's really what these controls will allow you to control is what the end facing angle is and upward facing angle is for the tips of your branches. So that's how pruning works in a global sense. Then meshing, we went over this already, but I just want to zoom in to illustrate it one more time since we're here. The intersection behavior, the way we have right now, if I put it on wireframe mode, you see that it's just a big piece of geosticking into the trunk there. What we can do is actually change the intersection behavior to do a Boolean plus normal blending and you can see that it actually takes a little bit to cook but it cuts the branch off and is no longer intersecting with the tree but it's trying to kind of create a geode that feels like it's kind of fused with that surface and then if I turn off wireframe mode it's kind of hard to tell here but it's doing somewhat of an attribute blend between the normals of the trunk and the normals of the branch to kind of make it feel like it's a little bit harder to see that crease there, that seam there, where those two would be touching. And then you have the option to just do that normal blending without having the boolean take place too. So that could be an option too, if you want something that performs a little bit better than having the full-on boolean going on. I'm going to just turn that off for now, say none. And I'm going to just hop up to the tree trunk generator and look at the top of it for this next section where we determine what the end caps look like. So in the tree controller, we've got end caps right now. It's set to grid. I could set that to none. And you can see that it just, you know, this is more or less telling Houdini what kind of geometry to stack into the end of that trunk like so. And we can choose like single polygon, I think default is grid. And this other one is single side single polygon and I'm not quite sure but it doesn't seem like that is working for me so I'm just going to leave that to grid the way we the way it was when we kind of came in here and then we have the resolution settings we kind of went over these as well but if I um you know if I increase or if I decrease the resolution along the trunk you can see that we're getting more divisions along our trunk like so um and same with divisions if I decrease those we get more resolution around our trunk like so. And the refinement amount, the way I understand this is sort of like an adaptive poly reduction kind of feature. So if I crank that up you can see that straight areas of our trunk actually have a lot of the divisions removed from them. And when I dial that down we get closer to the original resolution of our trunk. So that's just sort of a little optimization parameter in there if you would like. So I'm going actually for this next section on the tree trunk generator, I'm going to leave the resolution where it is for right now. So let's just reset that to default and we're going to control middle mouse on the resolution and the division. So resolution of point one, divisions of point two, which gives us enough to kind of look at our next features that are coming up here. The next tabs on the Tree Controller, we have the Material tab, and this is where we can apply, I think, more or less a material here, but since I'm going to be doing my materials, I'm going to be applying them in more of like a traditional way using a material node later. I'm going to ignore this for now, and I think that also displacement is a similar way that you could apply a texture here and actually have it displace the geometry surface. And also, LODs and visualization, I'm not going to cover those as well, but this would be a section where you could determine, you know, different levels of detail for your tree if you were going to be like making them for gains or something like that where you'd want to lower resolution tree further away and a higher resolution tree closer. So those features are there if you want to explore those. But for now, the main features of the tree controller are covered. And so now it's time to move on to what the tree trunk generator is doing. Is everybody doing okay? Does anybody have any questions so far? Excellent. I don't know if I can see the chat or not. So if something comes up, let me see if I can pop that up. I got you. Excellent. Okay, cool. So now let's take a look at the features of the tree trunk generator. This one's really cool. The first tab right here just gives us the controls that you would think. So length, you can choose how long the tree is, you can choose how thick the tree is, and also a ramp where you can control the kind of tapering of the tree. So if you want your tree to be really skinny at the top, you can kind of bring all these values down and get a nice taper, something like that, if that's what you're after. So it's really nice to have those curve, those ramp-based controls on the fan. So that's pretty self-explanatory there. Additionally, in the second tab here, we've got more tropism controls. And this kind of works now like a, if you're familiar with a take system or something like that, you can provide global settings for your tree using the tree controller, and then here you have override. So if you wanted to override your thigmatropism for this specific generation, this trunk generator right here, you can override that and supply different geometry. So this trunk will try to behave independently of the overall tropism settings that are controlling the entire tree by the tree controller. So that's sort of like an override setting there. The bend setting does what it says and allows you to just kind of add a little bend to your tree, however you'd like, as well as a curve to control how, where and when that bend occurs in your tree. So there's that. And the next one is the trunk shape. The trunk shape is really cool. This trunk shape allows you to create the illusion of root spigest sort of doing a radial displacement around the base of the tree. So if I say enable roots, you can see that it, I think the default setting is a little extreme, but you can see that it's popping out these roots in this pattern that's defined by this ramp. So you can kind of adjust the positioning of these root features, dependent on where you're popping out these little bumps in your ramp. So if you decrease the shape offset, you can bring this back to something that's maybe a little bit more realistic. But it kind of creates that feel that this trunk is generating branches that are kind of reaching out into the soil below, which is a neat feature to have. This position ramp is similar to the ramp on the general tab, where you can kind of control how high up the tree the those roots go. you can make a twizzler if you wanted to with this setting. It looks like. And then the roll and twist, these attributes just kind of control like how much twisting is going on along your trunk. So you can kind of make those roots kind of take a nice, you can almost make like sort of a sci-fi fantasy looking tree using those kind of twist settings like that. Hey, Mark, we do have a question from Paul. Any way to create actual routes like the speed tree does? I haven't noticed a way to do actual routes like that, but I think you might be able to, I can't say for sure, but you might be able to make another, like just kind of copy your tree setup and maybe actually just flip it upside down. And build routes that way. Yeah, what about mirroring? You could just put a mirror stop, right? Maybe? might be, I think that the roots will actually kind of spread out quicker to, you know, than they would going into the ground. So I'd have to do a little research on like how roots are formed. I don't think that that is taken into account with these tools, but it would really be cool if it was. And you might be able to actually redesign a different type of tree that was upside down that would mimic something a lot like a root system. That's a good question though. It's really cool. Yeah, so this is sort of how you can kind of mimic that the way the roots would look if they were forming above the tree. I'm just going to disable that for right now. And the rest of these settings are ones we've already covered. So it's these are overrides for the noise. If you wanted to have a different line noise here than on your tree controller, you could override that and it will allow you to supply a different type of a noise pattern just to your trunk if you wanted to. So I'm just going to turn that off. Same thing with mesh noise. You can control all those things here. So those overrides are always available to you. And in fact, when I go and build my tree, I don't really, I kind of like going node by node with my settings. When I'm building a tree, I feel like it just feels a little bit better to me than using the Tree Controller to control all the settings. So I actually just will disconnect this later on in the lesson and just go and build the trunk and then build the branches and so on and so forth. But I just kind of wanted to, it is part of the workflow and it is really powerful to have a global place to control a lot of these settings so I just kind of wanted to have it there to show you that you can create overall settings for your tree and then override them on the branch or trunk level, something like that. And the meshing resolution settings, those are all the same. You can override those here as well. So the next node is the tree branch generator. And this one has a bunch of a whole set of nodes or of parameters that are specific to it. So if I go to the general tab and I select the placement tab here, you can see that the placement mode is scatter at the moment. And we can more or less just choose how many branches that we want on this node by adjusting that scattering amount. So I can add 17 branches if I want to. And it's going to scatter them. The other way you could do is use edge length. Edge length is more or less gonna just try to, you're more or less just kind of determining how far away the branches are placed from one another. So it's a similar control, but you're not specifying necessarily, it's more like a density control. It's not specifying exactly how many branches you want, but it will actually try and keep them spaced evenly if you were to go back to the trunk and try to decrease the length. The number of branches will actually change, but they'll all sort of stay the same distance apart. I'm just gonna reset that. And so that's kind of how you can choose how many branches are being generated. I'm just gonna switch this back to scatter and we'll scatter eight for right now. And then here, this section right here is gonna determine, you know, our kind of like the angle, the angling of our branches as they're coming out of our tree. So right here, you can see we've got a branching pattern of 137.5, that's like a Fubanachi number. So I think that basically what it's saying is that we've got this first branch down here and then the next branch is actually gonna branch off 137.5 degrees around. So if we're looking at this one, like this angle from this branch right here to this branch right here, that would be 137.5, which is that figure not your number and look, I think I might, I might actually epic pen that one right here. You can see this is the first one. And that's the second one. And this angle right here should be that 137.5 degrees. And it does that with each successive branch. We'll kind of branch it off at 137.5 all the way around as it goes up the trunk like that. We have one more question from Larry. Does only the tree controller have the repeal track geofeature any way to have more than one geofor this? Is that the thigmatropism setting? I believe that you would, if you were going to want to have two different types of geos work that figmatrop is in type setting. You could probably, let me see here, let me just, I think if you, you would want to kind of merge everything together. So if you wanted to have a cube and a sphere, and then you would merge them together, and then you would kind of create, you know, your overall null that would, you know, this would kind of be the, this would be the overall geo that you'd want to plug in there. So we could say this would be avoid or something. And then if I go into the tree control, let me just move the box into a meaningful place. Like so and so we've got our tree and let's just make this box a little bit larger. Give it something to work with here. But now that we have, you know, we've got a box and a sphere and those have been merged. And now if I, if I'm, if I'm thinking about this, right, they should all be avoiding both of those things. So let's go to the tree controller into the tropism and thigmatropism. And instead of sphere one, I'm gonna put in this null right here. And it looks like it's trying to avoid both of those things at the same time. So you really just wanna kinda merge everything into one stop like this and supply maybe that null instead of just straight up geo. So anything I think you would pipe into here, would just want to into here you just want to make sure it's all merged. Does that answer that question? Is that sweet? Cool. Let's hop up here. I'm just going to turn that back off for a second. And we were in the, oh yeah, we're in the, yeah, this tree branch generator here. Let's turn off that template flag. Cool. And yeah, so we were talking about that branching pattern, sort of the angle in which it comes off. The next setting here is sort of, we can control that so that we can change that branching pattern to something like 90 degrees. And then if I take an overhead view, you can kind of see all these branches are coming off relatively at about 90 degree angles from another. And then there's the 180 degrees option, which really just has them kind of coming off left and right like so. And this is kind of a cool setting if you were gonna be doing something with like, maybe creating like a big leaf or a palm leaf or something like that. you could model that pretty well using this stuff. I actually am going to be using the 180 degree mode later and our last generation before our leaves because it just looked nice to me to have that those 180 degree splits from one another. Here they're set to alternate. We can actually do opposite and that'll double up the number of branches but you can see they're all coming off opposite one another. So that's sort of another feature of trees. And then you could also do the radial option. The radial option is actually gonna give you branches per node setting where you can actually choose how many branches you want coming off in a circle around your tree. So you might make a Christmas tree doing something like this. I don't know. I would have to research the properties of whatever tree you're making, but these are all structures that apparently occur quite often in nature. So they've given us a decent selection of things to work with there. I'm gonna set this back to 137.5. And here you can see there's this angle variation And the angle variation slider will just kind of randomize that distribution a little bit if you want as well. So that's there. The next sitting here is the branching angle. So this branching angle kind of determines how far up, or like what angle the base of this branch is coming off of that tree. So you can see if I set this up to 90, you can see that the very, very top branches are almost perfectly in line with our trunk. But if I, and then there's a ramp down here that kind of controls that. So if I bring up this lower bounds of that ramp, you can see we're almost folding our tree up entirely so that it all is sort of, all of those branches are just lined up along our trunk. Just gonna undo that. But that gives you sort of the control of, how quickly your branches fall off, how quickly they decide that they want to start growing in the direction of the tree trunk or the parent branch that's underneath it. So that's kind of what that is. If I reset that, here we've got our angle variation. So the angle variation is also an additional random value that's being added to all of this. And then roll will just rotate your branches radially around. So you get a little bit of control there to kind of control where those branches are coming out. And the randomization of the roll doesn't seem to work too well for me. So I think it might be on a per branch basis. I'm not sure how that's seated. but you, I think, may be able to do it on your second generation. And if you randomize this role, I believe that the branch, each branch might be rolling those slightly differently, but cool. So I'm gonna just reset those real quick and we've got our length. So the length of our branches, if I just go back to this first generation, the length of our branches is a value of 0.8. This is a multiplier on whatever its parent was. So this trunk right here is about 10 long. So this will be about 0.8 times 10. So it'll be about eight meters long. So if I decrease this value, you can see that it's all kind of changing. The length variation just adds some random values to that. So that's good. And then the length ramp kind of controls like where upon your trunk that these things all sort of start. I think that this inherited length profile, I think it only works on second generations. I'm not quite sure. But this, I haven't had too much luck getting this to work. I would think that this would change the length of the branches as they increase towards the end. But I found that that setting is really kind of controlled by this length ramp up here. If I dial this back a little bit, I'm just grabbing this end knot of this ramp. Let me just grab it here. If I grab that N knot, you can see that we're kind of changing how quickly the length of branches kind of falls off as they get closer to the tip of their parent branch. So that's sort of, that's sort of the settings about, you know, the angle and the length of our branches. The next one is how we control the radius of our branches. So by default, similarly to how the previous thing works, where we're determining the length of our branch based off of the length of the parent branch. This radius is going to be determined by the radius of the trunk where the branch is being placed. So this branch right here, for example, is going to have a radius. It's very close to the radius of the trunk in the location where that branch was placed. And then as we go closer to the top, you can see that these branches are a little bit thinner, but they match closer to the radius of the trunk where that was placed. So if I really drive this down, if I I'm just decreasing the thickness of our trunk towards the tap, but making it really thick towards the bottom. You can see that effect taking a little bit more hold here, where these branches are just thicker near the areas of the trunk that are thicker, and thinner near areas of the trunk that are thinner. So with that control, you have the ability to control the falloff. So how quickly they taper, you can modify that behavior using this ramp. And then the radius adjustment will just allow you to override, you know, that inherited radius from its parent branch by just like tweaking that value like so. And you can straight up override the inherited radius and just generate this however, however you would like you can just directly set the radius if you'd like that's what this is here, just going to turn that off. Like so, the next thing is a pruning settings, which is very similar to what we covered before. But with this one, I think we have another feature here. Yeah, if I turn on the second generation tree branch generator and look at its pruning settings, we can override pruning and adjust those settings, you know, as an override of what we had applied on the tree controller up here. But we can also just do a random manual prune. We can just randomly prune this by increasing the slider. And if we increase it all the way, all the branches of this second generation are completely removed. So you can kind of use that to add a little bit of extra control to that aspect of it. And then the manual prune, I don't know if there's viewer state bugs or whatever, but when I try to use manual prune, I kind of get some issues. So I'm just going to show, this should allow you to pick, to single out a branch on your own and just non-procedurally destroy it. So if I grab, if I hit that picker tool and I try and like, you know, pick one of these branches, I just can't seem to get it to, you know, select the branch correctly to be able to delete it, hit enter and it populates this with a bunch of little numbers and stuff like that, correspond to the primes that I just selected, but no branches really got deleted. But what I did find is that if I just reset this setting, and let's just go and I'll kind of illustrate this on the regular tree branch generator, but in the prune setting, I could just set a manual prune of zero and that's gonna get rid of that first one. And then you could kind of work your way up the tree like so. If you wanted to get rid of the third and fourth ones, you could just punch in three and four there and you would delete those branches. What are those, are you think that's like a connectivity thing? Or do you think, because those can't, they can't represent a premium because it's zero, right? Or one, you know what I mean? Yeah, I think that they are representative probably of, let me see here. Yeah. It might be the branch ID that we're providing. Cool. Because I think all of these generate branch IDs. Yes. Here, there you go. So if I go up to this one, see, but it might be self-contained to its individual level. Like if I prune level zero on this second generation, I don't think it's removing a, I don't think it's removing one from, yeah. Oh, I saw. It's removing like the first branch of that generation. So it must know. Yeah. So it must know what the idea is there. I'm just not exactly sure how it's determining it, but that's there. Yeah, that's there in case you need it. You might be able to actually manually go and prune the curves off. So I'll just try this real quick. I don't know if it's gonna work or not, but if I wanted to say, get rid of, if I wanted to get rid of one of these right here and I go into primitive selection mode just grab it and delete it. I'm not sure if this, so it has given me a prune number here. I'm just gonna wire that in between. So we're now blasting this off in between our generations. And then our next generation won't have that branch on there. And it seems like, yeah, I think that that branch was this one right here. If I turn that off. Now it seems like what it's done is it's pruned. It's prune that branch from existence and not allowed any branches of this generation from spawning on it. So I'm not quite sure how the structure works there, but that option is available if you're able to kind of figure out what branch it is that you want to prune in terms of a number, you could just throw down zero and then kind of middle mouse and slide over this until it finds the branch that you actually want to get rid of. You can see them kind of all popping in and out. Probably not the most ideal way. I don't think that's the way this tool is intended or this parameters intended to be used, but you could kind of try and zero or zero out or zero in on the branch that you want to get rid of that way. Got it. And then under the advanced tab of the true branch generator, there is the setting to detangle. And that, like what we were talking about before, is just going to add a little bit of a avoidance where these branches are gonna try to avoid one another, like so. And it kinda adds a neat little, it kinda adds some nice look to it, where it kind of, they kind of pop away from each other. It almost is like adding another additional noise to it, but it just helps it, you know, kind of fill the space a little bit better in some cases. I'm gonna leave it off though, cause I think it makes things take a little bit longer to cook. Yeah, I'm seeing here a Davis question about visualizing the branch ID with a marker and see if there's a match. So yeah, let's do that. Let's go back to the tree branch generator. And I'm gonna just go here and choose a branch ID. And I'm going to just change this visualizer. I'm actually going to pull this up. I'm going to duplicate it because I'm going to want this visualizer later. So I'm just hitting this Copy button here. And I'm going to change the type from color to marker. And we're going to say, that's the title is text. Yeah, that's good. So I can see here that this tree branch right here is two. I don't know if you can see it on the recording because it's really tiny. but those are a bunch of twos all over that tree branch right there. And so if I go in here and put in two, it's getting rid of it. It's getting rid of a different this branch over here. I think it's actually getting rid of it's getting rid of the next up branch because branch ID zero technically is the trunk. But in this generation of branches, it's ID for that generation is one plus the trunk. So it's going to be. So to get rid of branch ID 2, it's going to be 1 minus that. So I'm not sure if I'm not like 100% sure if that's the best way to do it in terms of, I don't know where this ID is really being stored. If it's not referring to that unless this parameter is tunneling down and saying do 1 minus whatever this is, or do 1 minus what max ID from the previous generation was or or something like that. Well, at least there's a relationship. I think that's good enough. Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, I'm just gonna reset that. And let's see here. We were looking at detangling. Yeah, so that detangling feature is there, if that helps. And then grid behavior, I'm not 100% sure on what the grid behavior does. I haven't explored that too much, but the ray points to surface is actually going to try to get the points that were generated by these branches to stick to the surface. So if I go wire wireframe mode, this isn't really a Boolean, but it's actually rang these points that are kind of sticking into the geometry. It's rang them onto the surface of the previous generation branch. So that's sort of what that does. I'm going to turn off that visualizer real quick. And yeah. So that was all stuff that was covered in the general tab on the labs tree branch generator. And the next tab over are all sort of the same things we've already discovered. So tropism, noise, meshing, all of this stuff is really similar, if not identical to what we covered in the Tree Controller. So all of those settings are there on an override basis. You can control them on a branch generation basis and so on and so forth. It's really handy to have those available on a per level, branch level basis. So the next node in our line, we kind of went, so we kind of covered all of these Tree Branch Generator nodes all at once. to just kind of have more of them there to kind of illustrate. But I just want to kind of go over some of the features of the tree leaf generator. So this tree leaf generator is, it got a lot of the same placement controls like we were discussing before. So if I look at the tree leaf generator and look at placement, I'm actually going to maybe disable the previous generation so we can really kind of just see, you know, how these leaves are behaving along one branch a little bit more clearly, it's not so cluttered. But here you can see that we've got our placement settings. So here we've got leaf node distance. This is like a density control. So if I increase that, the leaves are spaced further apart from one another. If I decrease that, we can get them very, we can just get an insane amount of leaves all stacked on top of each other. So that's sort of like a density, sort of like a spacing attribute, how far away they're spaced from one another. Just control middle mouse on that to reset it. You can also use a ramp. So that will allow you to kind of change how densely these are, how densely these are distributed along the length of the tree. So if I increase, maybe if I decrease this, I think that it's, they're more dense towards the beginning and then they kind of fan, they space out closer towards the tip. Just gonna turn that off and control click that one to return it to normal. And then here we've got overall scale. So this uniform scale is set to 0.4 by default. That's cool. Uniform scale variation adds randomness to the scale of the leaves. I'm looking over here. Armin, you tested it. Tested it, and it was associated with level ID. But it gets so difficult to see that I think just scrolling through them is easier. Yeah, the actual trees, tools themselves, are pretty gnarly on the inside. If you dive into them, there's just a whole lot going on. And this is looking inside the tree branch generator. there's just a whole bunch of things going on here. And I was able to get in there and modify them. And the last lesson of this course, we're gonna kind of change the way our rig works by modifying the inside of the tree branch generator and stuff like that. And it's gonna be really, it's kind of interesting. It took me a long time to build up the courage to look in there to try and modify it, but there's a lot going on in there and it's really well thought out, but there are some things you're like, wow, if I could improve this. The beautiful thing about Houdini is that you can get in there and modify that behavior if you really want to. So that's such a cool thing about these tools and in the labs tools and most of Houdini's tools in general that just almost like little open source projects inside of the software for you to explore and experiment with. So here we've got the, we were looking at just kind of the leaf shaping tools. We've got this sort of, you can add randomness to the scale. you can also adjust the scale of the leaves along the branch like so. So they just kind of, as the leaves grow along the branch, they get tinier. And then we've got pruning controls. Pruning controls are similar to what we discussed before. There's a random threshold. And then there's a prune by light availability. This is kind of a cool feature where it's going to, if we have more generations of branches, I'm just going to increase this. And maybe what I'll do, it looks It's like if I increase the threshold here, what it's trying to do is it's actually trying to analyze a light source coming from above by default, this light direction, which is pointing in the y direction. It's trying to analyze if rays are hitting those leaves, and then it's removing leaves that are inside that aren't being hit by those rays. So for our example project, though, we're going to be working with PAC and Instance. So we're going to be instancing our leaf geometry onto this geo. Can you change or rotate the directions of leaves? Yes, there is a orientation tab coming up. We'll get into that shortly, but you have all the controls of how you would orient the leaves right here. So this light availability thing, this light availability really only works when you have actual full on geo for your leaves. If I turn on pack an instance, it seems like it doesn't want to work the same way that I would imagine. Or it might actually be working, but it looks like it's messing with the branches below it. So I'm not quite sure. I'm not quite sure what happens inside of the lab street tools when I turn pack an instance on what prune like availability is doing. But it's there if you aren't using pack an instance. For our example, we're going to be using pack an instance because the way we're going to animate our leaves is going to be modifying like prim and transix and rotating and stuff like that. So I'm not going to be using prune light availability pruning for this, but it's a really cool feature that is there if you need it. And then again, let's see in the branch place, the general advanced tab, you have the ability to sort of offset these branches, offset these leaves from the underlying branch, if you want to, if you need to do like a correction because your geo was off a little bit, you can kind of adjust that here. And then I think that then these are just different methods of calculating normals and whatnot for this setting right here. So getting to the orientation stuff, This is sort of where you would control like how random these leaves are kind of branching off of this branch. So we've got roll, roll will kind of determine where along the, where down the length of the branch that those leaves are spawning off of, what direction they're kind of spawning off of. So a 90 degree angle, I think is what the default is. We'll kind of like make them come off to the sides and make them sort of available to light above. The yaw will actually control how the branches are oriented kind of along the branch. So you can kind of get them, if you increase this, you kind of get them to point along the branch or down. All of these have ramps, by the way. So we could, you know, change the yaw to be much more intense towards the end than at the beginning. And you can kind of see these branches are rather fanned out over on the right, you know, towards the stem here. But as we get, as we travel down that branch, you can see these leaves are starting to point forward more, which is a nice control to have. And those, these ramps are, you know, kind of buried in a lot of these parameters. You can find them throughout the whole entire, throughout a lot of the parameters on this, on this, on these tools. So if I just reset that, We get random randomization for the yaw. And then we get our pitch angle. The pitch angle will do kind of like, you know, what angle it's coming off at around the tree with respect to, you know, with respect to almost like the normals of the initial instance itself. So if you wanted to make a bunch of flapping birds, you could do that with the tree leaves and stuff like that. So you can randomize that as well and kind of randomize the different pitch angles and stuff like that. And then twist, actually I have to slide the slider to remember what that one does, but twist will actually twist the branch or the leaf right around its stem. So wherever that branch is kind of coming out, it just kind of rotates it around an invisible axis. It's kind of pointing along the leaf. It's gonna reset those. So those are sort of the orientation controls of the leads. You have a ton of control about pretty much every angle you would want to have those things spawn off of, which is nice. And then here we also have tropism, where we can override that. Now, if I have pack an instance on this tropism, I can't even, I can't do anything with tropism because tropism like is a feature that kind of works on the mesh level itself. So if I turn off pack an instance, we get the bendalung parent controls and the gravitive tropism and stuff like that. But it's going to be trying to affect the actual mesh of the geo itself. And I have found that it's really touched. Like I have to use really extreme values to get it to kind of kick in. But if you are doing like straight up geo for your leaves, you can kind of control that using these tropism controls here. Same thing goes for the noise. You can add noise to your leaves themselves as long as it isn't in pack and instance mode. So if you wanted to add additional noise to all of your branches, all of your leaves, you could do that using these kind of controls like this. You can kind of mess those leaves up a little bit if that's what you're looking for. So you got your primary and secondary and then resolution, it looks like resolution right here is going to actually determine what these pre-made cards are resolution are. So by disconnect the tree leaf generator, these pre-made cards, you can kind of control how much resolution is there. But we're going to be making our own cards to supply for our tree in just a second. So that those are sort of like the main core tree tools inside the tree, the lab street tools. These are sort of the basis of what we're going to be kind of using to build our tree in our main example. But there are a couple other ones I just wanted to cover real quick before we go into looking at how we can just kind of set up the materials and get our tree looking the way we want to for the rest of our project. The tools that I wanted to look at were one of them is actually a parameter and the other one is an actual, is the tree branch placer. So I want to throw down a tree branch placer to start off with. And this tree branch placer is very similar to the tree branch generator. It takes in these two inputs and we're just going to look at placing a branch, placing branches onto the trunk. So So by default, nothing happens. And there's two modes that the Tree Branch Placer operates in. So the reason why, I want to make it so that it's known that you know that this tool exists, because in our advanced example, we're going to be using it. But like what we were looking at before, where it comes to branch IDs and stuff like that, I found that the Tree Branch Placer isn't actually generating branch IDs and branch leveling in a meaningful way that would work with a rig that works with the tree tools out of the box. I had to modify the innards of the lab's tree tools in order to get tree branch, custom tree branch placement to work with the rig that I had created. And I also had to modify the rig that I created. I had to kind of make both meet each other halfway in order for that to work. But I want to make sure that you know that these tools exist because they are rather cool. So the tree branch placer has two modes of operation. One is placed branches and the other one is drawn branches. You can actually supply a curve in the second input that will allow you to draw a branch. So if I throw in a curve and I'm going to just switch to my front view by hitting space bar three and I've got my curve tool. I'm just going to draw a nice little curve coming off to the right like so. And notice how I actually started drawing when I was rehearsing last night, I started drawing my curve up here and drawing it back towards the trunk. And it actually wants you to be drawing your curves from the trunk off to the, you know, away from the truck so more or less your first point should be around the trunk. And I don't know why this is the case but by default. It doesn't line up with the curve we just created. Actually, if you look at the drawn branches section right here, it comes in with an angle of 133.5 and a roll of 138. And if I reset, oops, I set roll to zero and angle to zero, you can see that if I template this and grab our curve, that the curve is perfectly lined up with the true branch that we just created. And if we switch into editing mode, we've got total kind of control and art directability of the way this hero branch works, which is really, it was really cool to have this kind of control. We have a question from Larry. Will you show us how to modify or redraw the simple leaf shapes that is possible to make any shape you want for this? Actually, Larry, I believe you can just plug in any piece of geo instead of the leaf that it gives you. And I don't know if that answers your question, but you can put any, as far as I know, you can put any piece of geometry, right, Mark? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, cool. Yeah, as long as it isn't too heavy, so you wanna like manage packing and instancing correctly and stuff like that, if you're using like large instances with like really high polygeo. But what we're gonna do in just a couple minutes is actually create our own leaf cards so that we can render leaves that look kind of like, what was the example? I don't know. We're going to, there'll be a transparent leaves. Let me just pull up the, I don't have the video handy, but we're going to be creating our own leaf cards and kind of plugging them in there. And that should give you kind of an idea of how you can create your own geo and supply it to this tree leaf generator. So, oh, yeah, we'll definitely kind of get a feel for that. But in just a sec. And so the tree branch placer, the curve method of placing branches is cool. We have that one. I just want to demonstrate the other mode of operation. So I'm just going to turn off the curve for right now and go to placed branches. And placed branches will just let you, you can click the plus button here. And it will add a little branch down there at the bottom. And you actually can just position it by hand by adjusting the parameters in this little thing that pops up here. So you can see you got a length parameter, a position parameter, and I really only think that modifying the position parameter works really well, but there's the rotation parameter you can kind of control where it is around the tree, and it's radius and it's bend and everything like that. So you can kind of adjust the up vector angle of that. So that's another way of kind of hand placing branches if you want to do that. But because of the way the attributes are generated on this, like I was saying, when you create your tree for next week and you want to follow along with the rigging that we're going to be doing next week, I wouldn't use the tree branch placer because it's not going to generate the attributes that we need, at least that I've found that's going to work with the tutorial that I made because of just limitations of the number of attributes that are coming off. But at the end, we are going to dive into a more complicated example where I modify what attributes are being output from these tree tools and the tree branch blister so that it all falls in line and is able to work in the bigger rig. The other parameter that I wanted to explain in the same vein is an attribute issue related to branching, or sorry, it's a parameter issue related to providing branches to certain levels. So if I, for example, want to now do my second generation of branches off of this tree branch placer, I'll just kind of show where this kind of comes into play. to play. I've got this custom branch that I actually use the let's use the drawn one and I'm going to turn off the placed one. So if we clear the placed branches and we just have that curve that we drew before. So we've got these two branches and I want to have more generations spawn off of this. When I wire this in here you can see that it's only spawning off of this last level that was created. This is where this branch on group setting is created here. You can say right here what you could do is you could actually say, well, I actually want to create these branches on the branch that I just created and the one before it. So you could actually override this branch group here and say, I want a branch on level zero and then it won't branch on this next generation. And you can say, I also want a branch on level one. And because of the assumptions that we're going to make when we When we build our rig, we're going to be making assumptions in our geo that says branch one, branch level one is only going to branch off of branch level zero. Branch level two is only going to branch off of branch level one. And that's sort of how the base rig is going to work. So that's why I'm going to avoid using branch on group features and tree branch places for now until we go over the more advanced example at the end of the course. I did want to let you know that those nodes are there because they're super cool and that those features are there this being able to decide which group you're branching on is really handy when you get into when you get into it. So, that's sort of the overview of all the main labs tree tools that we have. And now what I want to do is just kind of go through and build the hero tree that we're going to be using for our course. I'm going to actually get rid of this sphere and the curve and the tree branch, place, and all that stuff. I'm just going to delete those. We're going to just start off with, and I mentioned this before, but I actually like working personal preference, but you can feel free to use the lab's tree controller. I kind of just like working one node at a time. I'm going to just get rid of the tree controller itself, and I'm going to just start with the trunk by itself. And what I want to do is just modify the settings of the trunk to get the kind of thing that I'm looking for here. So I'm going to grab my tree trunk generator and just kind of go into adjusting some of the settings to get them the way along. The main one is with the roots. I'm going to just go to the trunk shape. I want to add some roots to the trunk. I'm going to reduce the partial twists back to their default setting, maybe even a little bit less. Let's do something like 100. I just wanted to stop real quick and ask if anybody had any questions regarding the main overview of the lab street tools. I know I kind of blasted through a bunch of that stuff and it's a ton of information, but it is, you know, I just kind of had to get through it, you know. I'm trying to look for my chat book here. Here we go. I think we're good. Cool. All right, so let's actually get into art directing this tree and get it looked the way that we want. I'm gonna let's just move this over here and this over here. Cool. So I want to adjust the noise. I'm going to go into the line noise settings And I'm going to actually, let's just increase the, and what I want to do is actually have a really like kind of a gnarly looking trunk with a lot of character towards the top. So I'm actually going to do my thing, which is disable my secondary noise for a second so I can really see what that first noise is doing. And I'm going to decrease the frequency quite a bit. So let's just decrease the frequency to about 0.2 and increase the intensity to be really high. So we start to get larger shapes in larger character inside of our tree. I'll set the intensity of value of like 0.8. You can kind of see that that trunk is kind of moving in a much more, yeah, I don't know, it's just got a lot more character to it. And then the second thing I want to do is just add a little bit of that secondary noise to gnarlet up a little bit. So I'll maybe bring that secondary noise intensity back up to one, and then maybe just drop the frequency down a little bit. I'll just drop the frequency down to say 0.5. So you can see it's just adding just a little touch of gnarliness to that tree. The next thing that I wanted to do was I'm going to just set the resolution by default, the resolution defaults here, I'm going to, let's say, increase the divisions around it to like a value of 0.8. So just it's kind of keeping its resolution going up the tree, but I'm just kind of reducing some of the resolution around the bottom. Honestly, this is just more or less for performance reasons. I would in the end probably want to keep things higher res. I just don't want to have too much geo to be dealing with during this. So the next thing I want to do is I'm just going to grab a copy of our tree branch generator here and slide it over. And we're just going to wire this one in. Now I think that this tree branch generator should be pretty close to the default other than the fact that we changed the detangling feature, which I am going to leave off. So we can just kind of focus on the placement of our tree branches on the second generation first. I'm going to reduce the resolution. So I'm going to increase this number to 0.4 and also kind of increase the divisions to 0.8. So that just reduces the poly count on the tree branches. And then I want to get into, let's go to the general tab. And I'm going to just increase the number of branches to something like 10. And the other thing I wanted to do was enable a little bit of tropism. So in the tropism settings, I'm going to enable bend along parent and just dial this value way down to like negative, let's say negative 0.05. So we kind of get just a little bit of that branch curvature, you know, coming up along the trunk like so. And then the branches are looking very straight. So I want to add a little bit of noise to them. Let's go to the line noise. I'm gonna enable line noise. And I'm gonna do my thing, which is just gonna turn off the secondary noise for a second by setting that intensity to zero. So I can really dial in this first main noise. And I'm gonna reduce the frequency. So we get like another thing, like similar to like what we did with the trunk below. I want to get these branches to have some larger movements, some larger character to them. So I'm going to decrease the frequency to about 0.3 and then just increase this intensity to something like four. And you can kind of see those branches have a lot more kind of character to them. And then just to add additional gnarliness to it, I'm going to add a higher frequency noise. So I'm going to increase the intensity of the secondary noise right here and then increase the frequency a little bit. And that just adds a little bit of, so a little bit of movement to those branches that feels nice. So let's say for an intensity value, let's 2.5 and a frequency value of 1.9. Looks like it's pretty good to me. And now once I kind of get my branch settings the way I like them, I'll just kind of option drag them down and apply them to the next generation and see how things look. So taking those settings that we just did on that first generation and applying to the second generation, it's looking pretty good. So a couple of tweaks I'd wanna make. I think I might wanna prune a little bit to keep branches like this from poking into the ground. So I'm going to hop down to the pruning settings in the general tabs under prune. I'm just going to prune up the downward facing angle to something like, let's say point, say 60 degrees seems to be good to me. Cause I like, I still like these branches coming off horizontal and stuff. I just don't want them pointing so much down. So that's good with that. I'm sorry, I'm just gonna, I just got to refer to my notes a little bit. So if I'm looking off to the side, that's sort of what I'm doing here. Just want to make sure. All good. Cool. The next thing is I've noticed that the branches kind of feel like they're really keeping their length towards the end of their child branches. And I kind of want to reduce that a little bit. So that was back on the placement tab. We can just grab this last knot of the length ramp and kind of dial it down a little bit. So there's a few knots that are kind of stacked on top of each other at the end here. I'm going to kind of just remove all of those. So I just have one that I'm working with here. And if I pull this down and just get that slider, I can get the branches to kind of be shorter as they get closer to the tips of their parent branch. And I think I'll leave the rest of the scattering settings looking good. I like the way all these angles. I just think that one of the issues that I'm kind of not liking is how when we get in really close to these branches, their mesh noise is way too intense. These branches are kind of getting fatter and thinner. I don't know if that's really apparent, but it just, I just want to reduce that. So I'm just going to go over to the noise setting in the mesh noise. And I'm going to decrease this intensity value. So it's not doing this, but it's doing something a little bit more predictable. Like a value of 0.1, I thought was good enough for this example. So that's looking pretty good so far. And the next thing I'm going to do is just copy this out and do another generation. I'm just basing this generation of what I did on the previous generation. I liked what I did here. I'm just gonna copy it and just wire it in and see how lucky I get and make adjustments from there. So now on this one, things are looking a little wispy and crazy, but I think it could work. It's gonna kind of set, take a look at some of these settings that I have here. I know on this one, because these branches are getting a lot smaller, I could reduce this resolution even more if I wanted to, but I think that it's fine for right now. And, you know, I think that this is looking pretty good. So I think I might just move on and create one final generation before we throw down our branches just so that I can kind of get a feel for, you know, I might do actually on this one, I'll just go to the general tab and just maybe make them a little bit shorter towards the end. So I'm just taking this length ramp and just dialing it slightly down. So those branches are a little bit shorter as they get to the end of their thing. So on this last generation, I'm going to actually have a different branching generation. So this is actually what I think is like the, this is going to be the branching generation that comes right before where we add our leaves. And one thing I wanted to do was to have them branch out at that 180 degree pattern like we were talking about before. So let's just option drag this out. And this is going to get a little bit heavy at this point, but it's all good. It'll, it'll be worth it in the end. This is going to be super heavy because I didn't reduce the number of the number of scatters on this level. So things are looking, it's looking like a, like a total rat's nest here. But what I'll do is get in here and just reduce the branch nodes down to something like three. So that'll significantly reduce the number of branches that were generated on our previous generation. I'm just going to kind of zoom into one of these branch ends over here. So I wanted to use the 180 degree branching pattern. I also want to reduce the noise. I'm just going to disable line and mesh noise for this so that I really just get straight twigs sticking out. It'll make things a little bit easier to see. But I can see my three branch generations right here on this branch. And if I just switch this over to the General tab and say opposite, we get branches that sort of spawning off at opposite angles from one another. And those will sort of be the branches that we'll add our leaves to. I kind of like, I just like the way that this looked for my final generation of branches. I mean, obviously, everything's pretty low poly right now. And you may want to manage that when we're getting into the animation portion of it, it'll make things go a lot faster if it's lower poly. But, you know, in the end, you're likely going to be able to crank the resolution up on a lot of these lower generation branches to add extra detail to your tree. And it should all just function fine. But for right now, I'm just going to leave it the way it is. And now we can add our leaves. So let's grab a tree leaf generator. I'm just going to grab the one that we were using before. And there's option drag that over and wire this in like so. And you can see that by default it's putting all of those cards that come with the Tree Leaf Generator onto our tree. And I want to, let's see, on the Tree Leaf Generator, what I want to do is actually, because we're not, I'm not going to be using the cards that they provide, I want to actually provide our own cards. So now we're going to actually kind of get into how we can set up the materials, because The materials are really tied to how these leaves work. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna back on out and we're gonna create our basic redshift settings to start doing our rendering here. So I'm gonna just hop up here to the object level and I'm just gonna throw it on a CycWall, call it grid. Or I'm gonna throw it on a grid that is going to be our CycWall and I'm just gonna dive inside of that. I'm also going to choose a camera angle pointing down the positive z axis. So if you look at my nomen in the corner, my x axis is pointing off to the right. And so I'm going to pick a camera angle kind of like this and control click on my camera. And maybe just pull it back a little bit and maybe up something like that just kind of frame up our tree. And then I'm going to untick the lock so that my camera is sort of locked in space there like so. And then I'm going to dive into the grid and sort of make it a cyc wall with respect to the view that we have. So real quick, let's just increase the size of the wall to a thousand by a thousand. That's a hundred. I'm just going to add an extra zero, a thousand by a thousand and then throw it on a bend. And why are that in here? And then I want it to capture, I want it to bend in the opposite direction since our camera's over here. So I'm just going to switch over my capture direction to negative one. And then I'll maybe move my capture origin in the negative z direction a little bit so that it's not bending the ground right near our tree. But I'll increase that a little bit and maybe increase the capture length a bit so that that slips a little bit more gradual. And then I'll just add more resolution to our grid by just making it 100 rows and 100 columns. So when we hop back into our camera now, we should have a nice cyc wall behind our tree. And I'm going to throw down a, I'm gonna actually add a render view over here. So I'm just gonna pop that up real quick and hit the alt bright bracket to split that view. And then I'll right click on this tab and then choose redshift render view. And I'm gonna just fire off one real quick to see what we've got so far. It should just be very boring gray dark tree. I'm gonna throw down a on my redshift shelf. I'm gonna use the redshift light sun. And that should, did that? Oh, it didn't come in because I have to hit enter. So there that is. And let's just turn the rendering out again. Everything's like very blown out white, so that's looking promising. I'm just going to change the angle, so I'm just kind of focusing on the shadow of the tree right now. I'm just going to change this rotation angle to 60 so that we kind of have more of an angled shadow there. And the only other thing I wanted to change on the light was the sun disc scale just to increase that to five so that it softens up this shadow a little bit. not really important, but just figured it looked nice. And now we can get into making our leaves and our materials. So I'm gonna actually split my view up into the quad view that I like to use for a lot of things. So it's gonna be two network parameter view prepared things. So I'm gonna, over here, I'm gonna alt right bracket to create another network view here. I'm gonna alt right bracket to create another parameter view here. I want my parameters to be up here though. So I'm gonna say alt three on this view. And then I'm going to hover my mouse over here and say Alt2 on this view. So that gives us a network view down here and a parameter view up here. And then I'm going to just tie this one to link one, link one and link two and link two. And so these two separate networks are going to be paired up with their respective parameter views above. And so we're making materials. I'm going to hop into the map context. So let's hop in here. And I'm going to throw in an RS material builder. And this we'll call this the trunk texture. Or this will actually be the trunk and branches. I'll just say branches. And if I jump in here, we've got our material. I want to apply this to our tree, but I want to apply two different materials. So I'm going to jump into the tree, and we're actually going to split off right now. So what we can do with our leaf generator and with our trunk generator is we can actually, one of the settings on the leaf generator and the branch generators will allow us to isolate the geo. So in here, you see this option that says delete previous levels. We can actually click that. And you can see that we only have our leaves left behind. So we can actually kind of break off a geo stream for our leaves and a separate one for just our branches and trunk. So from here, what we can do is throw it on our material and we'll apply a material to these branches and we'll just option drag that over and copy it and apply another material to these leaves and then I'll just merge them together. And throw it on a null. And this will be our tree. Tree. So on this material, we're just going to work on the branches first. I'm going to zoom in a little bit closer and control click to create another camera here so that I can kind of see what I'm doing with my branch material. Now, the materials that I had mentioned at the beginning of the lesson. I'm just going to kind of copy them into my project directory. So I'm just going to pull up my windows here. I've got this, which is my working project, this lesson one recording file that we're working with. And then this is my other project file that has my Maple Leaf and Oak Bark textures. You can see that Maple Leaf is here with all these different maps. And the Oak Bark is here with all these different maps. And I've placed it into a text folder. So I'm just I'm just going to create a text folder here. And I'm going to jump inside and just grab that Maple Leaf and Oak Bark texture and copy them and paste them in here. So I got those where they need to be. And let's just start building out a very basic material for our branches. This is obviously not a rendering course, but I just want to get things going with that so it looks at least somewhat plausible. then you can all feel free to take this to the maximum level rendering texture quality that you would like. But for our purposes, it's going to be pretty basic. So let's just start on an RS texture and grab the Albedo material under this. We'll jump in the text folder into the oak bark texture and grab the Albedo and we'll wire this into the diffuse color. I'm just going to expand the base properties out a little bit. So now if I click render, I should see the option to select camera 2 here. I don't see it applied. I got to apply it to this material right here. So on the material node inside of where we're building our tree, I'm just going to select the branches, hit accept, and we can start to see that color appearing, it is really glossy and so we need to definitely get our roughness map in there so I'm going to option drag the texture sampler down and grab the roughness. and just wire that into the reflection roughness. That kind of makes things less glossy. And then I'm going to do something. I'm not even going to do a displacement with this. I'm just going to do a bump apply a bump map for the bar texture to just give it a little bit of shading. So I'm just going to option drag this down and grab the height map and hit accept. And I'm going to maybe spin. I'm going to spin that material up. so it's kind of closed off, but thrown on a bump. And I'm just going to wire this into the input and then wire this into the redshift material bump map. And you can see we get that kind of bark look going on with our tree. So that's a good starting point. And from here, you obviously can, you know, get involved with doing all sorts of displacement and making things really, really fancy. Right. Just dial that height scale down by down to maybe 0.2, just to make it a little less intense. Nice. So now that we've got that, the branch texture kind of created, I want to create the leaf texture, but this is kind of where we're going to get into generating our own leaf geo. So I'm just going to hop back out to where we're building our network here. And I've got all these other nodes from the initial demo. I'm just going to delete those. And we're going to build our leaf, we're going to build our leaf based off of those atlases that we had downloaded. But in order to do that, we need a grid to kind of place them on. So we're going to manually, this is sort of the process, you would manually create a leaf. I'm going to just, for our example, throw in our grid. And I'm going to keep it kind of in the same size as what the simple leaf generator was doing, kind of on a one, like a normalized one to one scale. So let's just grab the size of our grid and set it to one by one. So it's a lot smaller down here. And then I'm going I'm going to just change the rows and columns to a two by two. So it's really just one poly here. I'm just going to say hide other objects real quick. So we've just got one poly here and I want to apply a UV quick shade and then use the UV quick shade to kind of crop in on the leaf that we want to use for our texture. So we're going to throw it on a UV quick shade and the texture that I want to choose for our leaf is in the leaf textures folder. We're just going to go to the maple leaf folder and choose that albedo. And you can kind of see that we get a default UV mapping for our leaves like so. And I wanna just grab this one in the corner. We're just gonna work with this one right here. And so what I could do is, you know, I thought maybe what I could do is just grab the vertices of this polygon and kind of crop in on it. So if you grab the grid and we switch to point selection mode, so I'm just hitting the S key and then tapping this little, you know, icon up here and just grab this with the actual UV quickshade visible, grabbing this grid node and then selecting this point and hitting the T key, I can start to drag this around. And you can see that because I'm generating the UVs on the UV quickshade after I'm making this edit, I can just hit S and T. S and T on this one. See now, now things are getting messed up. So UV quickshade is trying to guess what dimensions it's projecting onto this polygon, and it doesn't know. Because we're changing it, and so it's not allowing us to really crop in on that leaf. So what I do at this point is I just supply my own UVs. So we're just going to say, I'm just going to hop back up to the, I'm going to disable this edit, hop back up to the grid, and throw it on a UV project. And wire that in like so. And this is going to be, we're just going to initialize this to the best plane. So initialize to best plane, say initialize. And because this grid isn't modified, the UV is going to be projecting down along the Y axis and like totally just lined up the way we want it. But then the cool thing is that if we turn on our edit, we're still getting the same issues, but if we move our edit to before the UV project, since we've got those settings from our perfectly laid out grid, we can actually move these vertices around with our edit and not have it cause any problems. So we can perfectly crop in on our leaf like this. So I'm just gonna hit the S key, grab this point and hit the T key and grab this little planar slider and just move it around so we can grab that. And I'm just gonna also grab this one right here and move, scooch it over a little bit because it looks like it was kind of getting into the section of the map that's cause it to start to repeat. But here we've got our one leaf sort of cropped in on. Next thing I wanna do is just place it and normalize it along this. Place it on the Z-axis for cloning purposes or scattering purposes and make it about the size of one so that when we're controlling our values on our leaf generator, we know that the size that we're determining is somewhat predictable. So let's throw down a match size. You know what, match size. And why are that in here? And let's just justify z to the minimum. So that's gonna kind of put our polygon right there at the origin. And what is the other thing we wanted to do? Oh yeah, we wanted to scale it to fit a size of about one. So it's somewhat normalized, more predictable for us. And then if I throw UV quickshade back on, there's just one other issue we gotta solve for. And it's that even though we've put this at the origin, the stem is still kind of slightly off of our origin. So I'm gonna just modify where that stem is thrown on a transform. And if I grab that transform, if I select the transform while the UV quickshade is visible, this makes it a little bit easier to deal with, but I'm gonna grab my manipulator and hit the insert key to move into pivot position mode and just position my pivot right there on the tip of that leaf. So that's good. I'm gonna hit the insert key again to go back to normal moving mode. And I'm just going to right click and copy the pivot transform that we just set right here in this parameter. So right click copy parameter, go to translate and say paste relative reference. And it moves it a little bit more in the wrong direction. We just gotta put a minus sign in front of each one of these parameters. So in Y we put a minus sign before, In Z, we put a minus sign for it. And now that pivot that we selected has got our leaf stem perfectly locked on the origin. The other thing that I wanted to do to this geo is just to apply a little bit of a bend to it. I wanted the leaf to actually kind of bend a little bit like the simple leaf did. So if we look at the simple leaf, simple leaf is about the same size, but it's got this nice shape to it. So I'm just gonna throw it on a bend here. And the bend by default isn't going to work too great. It's just going to actually rotate the geo. We just need to supply some more geometry here. So right above the bend, put on a subdivide and give it a couple of divisions. Let's just say a subdivide depth of two and let's bend it by, let's see negative 60. Just to keep that nice and bent like so. And, you know, we look at this kind of looks, you know, it's starting to look like a leaf other than the fact that it's got all this bordering texture around it. But we have an alpha channel with our atlas and it's going to work great. We'll plug it into our texture and we'll do that right now. So let's go back over here to the material builder, and we can build our leaf texture. So let's say RS material builder. And we'll say leaf. And we're just going to hop inside here. Oh, I wanted to obviously wire this into my actual, I wanted to wire this into the leaf generator to actually show that we're going to place it on our tree. just wire that into this third input right here and then if I go to the Tree Leap Generator and hit space bar F and wire in the UV quickshade, you can kind of get a preview that we have placed our own leaf geo on all of those branches. But we just don't need to apply this sort of visualization texture. We need to actually create a texture for our leaf. So with the leaf material selected, the material node selected over here, I'm going to just select from our list. I'm going to select the leaf material that we just created and hit accept. And then let's start throwing in our maps. So I'm going to throw down a texture, redshift texture, and wire this into the diffuse color. This is going to be the albedo texture for our maple leaf. So I'll be done. Grab that. And I'm going to option drag this down. And I'm going to select the alpha channel because we need that to get our opacity. So I'm going to wire this into the overall opacity color section. And then I'm going to option drag it down and we're going to select our the only I can't remember which maps I'm using for this one sec. I'm going to be using the I think it's the yeah We're using roughness and so we'll get the roughness map here and the translucency map, which is a cool map. It will allow us to sort of fake the fake like a sort of sort of subsurface look for our lead so I'm going to grab the Translucency map right here. Except, yeah, I'm going to before I forget what I'm doing here. Let's wire this roughness into the base properties reflection roughness. The texture, the translucency is going to go into base properties, translucency color. I'm just going to expand this out so I can see where these wires are going a little bit better. And let's see the other thing I needed was the bump map I'm just going to do a bump map for the leaves as well so we just need to option drag this down and get the height file and wire this into a bump. and wire that bump into the bump map of the output. So now if I get my camera two, which is our camera for kind of previewing close up stuff, I'm just gonna lock it and fly into a little chunk of leaves like this one right here and just hit the fire off render and see where we're at. I think by default the, I think by default the actual roughness is way too intense. These leaves look very dark. I'm going to go down to, or it's not the roughness, it's the bump map. The bump map is crazy. Let's dial this back to value of.02. And that's looking a little bit better. And the translucency, we've added the translucency color map in there, but I just want to add a little bit of weight to it. So if I increase the weight to one, those leaves will really start to kind of pop in that sunlight and start to feel like they're more alive. And when I came back to my other view, so go back to camera view one, for whatever reason, from this angle, I felt like I wanted to push the translucent even further, which, you know, it's probably not the most realistic, but I pushed it to a value of two and kind of like the way it looked. It just felt very saturated and stylized, I guess, almost to me, I don't know, maybe the leaves are thinner or greener or whatever. So I just kind of did it that way. And so now it's gonna turn the rendering, the IPR off off and just get my tree highlighted down here and fire this off one last time and we should have the beginnings of what we're going to be using for our tree for the rest of the course. And that is it. So this is awesome. Hey, we did it just just in the nick of time. Yeah. Yeah, so I would say, you know, for, does anybody have any questions at this point about anything or any questions anyone. I see we got one here about preparing the tree for an atlas in a similar way. I'm not sure. You mean like MIP, what is it called, MIPMAP? Or like, you can talk, Peter. We can have a conversation. Yeah, I was just curious. It's very impressive to get the kind of texturing for the leaves. I was wondering if it's possible to get the same sort of workflow or a look for the tree if that's possible. If that's possible. Are you so are you talking about like using cards for your branches or like using your own custom geo for branches and stuff like that. Just the texture. Like if I went to make a scam. Could I prepare the tree with like a quick shading project and lay it out similarly as you did to the leaves. Yeah, you might be able to I haven't really I never thought of that that might be an option I know I'm inside of the inside of the tree. So all of these trees, all these tree branches, they have groups associated with their levels. So I know that if you wanted to apply different materials on a per branching level basis, you could use these primitive groups to kind of isolate your tree like branch branching levels to kind of adjust that. I'm not I'm not sure entirely how much control you have over the individual branches themselves and kind of being able to like UV map them individually I'm guessing that each tree is sort of each branch is sort of UV map on its own let me just hop up to the second generation. And I'm going to hop out of my locked view. And I'll just frame that up and let's hit space bar five. So, it looks like. It looks like the branches are spanning multiple UV spaces, I believe. So that's probably why we get the repetition that we do along the branch. It's not just like one stretched out bark texture, but it does have some sort of repetition. So it is repeating the pattern as it goes through. So look at the tree trunk. Yeah, you can see that the tree trunk itself has a couple maps that are placed. know, this is probably the end caps right here, but then the whole tree trunk is actually spanning off multiple UV spaces. So I'm not multiple lengths of the UV space. So I'm not exactly sure how you would do that. I mean, ultimately, you probably could modify the way these UVs are constructed somehow. I'm sure inside it's a sweep node that's kind of generating it. And I know that the sweep node gives you a little bit more control over how the UVs are constructed, but I don't know offhand per se. Yeah, for sure. Any other questions anybody. I've got a question. Obviously, I think you would, but if you wanted to render a few of these, I assume you'd want to bake it down, export it as some object format and then just load and render that. Yes, I was experimenting around with this and I would render this whole thing out as a redshift proxy and then instance those on a scene. And this is like super, I have an example of it, but it's a work in progress that I'm not really allowed to share. But I created one pine tree using atlases from mega scans for the pine needles and stuff like that and using the bark texture from mega scans. And I was able to get thousands of these in redshift scene using redshift proxies. So it's really cool. And another thing that is also kind of cool about it, and we just switch back to my normal view here, is that these, if I just temporarily wire in the lab's tree controller real quick, you can see that, well, these are all kind of overrides, but you've got randomization control. I forgot to mention that. So you've got a randomization control that you can, you can, like, if you were to wedge this out in tops, you could just select a different randomized node and it's gonna take a second to cook, but then you're getting totally unique trees And that randomization parameter is on, if I disconnect this, that randomization parameter is on all of these, on all of these levels, I think we've got, it looks like if I select this one, I see that it looks like the randomize is turned off on this one. You have to select randomized length, I believe. And then it goes on. Oh, this one does. Yeah, I'm talking about the, Oh, because it's a trunk, it doesn't have anything to, because it's a trunk, yeah, this is randomizing the length. So I guess, I don't know if it's possible for you to make more trunks, but this will allow you to randomize that trunk length. There you go, yeah, that's exactly it. So you can randomize your trunk length here, and then on your tree branches, there's also a randomized here. So you could theoretically just send this through PDG and wedge out like as many trees as you want, and then all of those randomization, just have the PDG just wedge all of those randomization parameters and just generate tons of unique trees. I don't know how many of those you could do before you break a giant instancing setup, but I do know that kicking this out as a redshift proxy works fantastically. That's so cool. So you basically bake it out, I mean, write it out and then bring it in as a proxy and it's like a shader that is being instanced. Yes, totally. So like I would just, you know, know, because we've got a rendering of it working right here, like this tree is actually rendering correctly if I need to reset my settings but in the out context, I would just create a RS proxy. Redshift proxy output. And then just say on the archive here, the stop path, I would just grab this tree, throw it in there. And then I could write this out to disk and then scatter it onto points using some sort of a redshift instancing path attribute and you would have thousands and thousands of trees. It's just redshift's instancing capabilities are like really, really seem really stable and they will really fast. I was shocked how many pollies I hadn't that seen if you really got down to it. Like you were to add up how many pollies were on all those trees and how many thousands of them we hadn't seen. It was like, whoa, like really, really, really nuts. What about packing and instancing? I mean, if it's packed, isn't it essentially the same thing? I know that like, I haven't tried to do it in a while, but I know that I know that there's like a slight difference between the way Houdini's native pack instancing works and the way redshift does. My experience like way in the past, like many versions of redshift ago was that the redshift proxies are super stable and loaded super fast and if you can do it that way you should. But things may have changed by now. It might be the same. It might be a total wash. I don't know for sure at this point whether they're or really whether there's that much of a difference anymore. And the proxies be animated? Yes, you can totally animate these proxies. So like what you could do is after this proxy, after we create our animation for a sec, we could pipe this in here and kick out a file for each of the hundred frames of our growth animation. And then if you were able to instance that growth animation onto all of your different points and just provide a frame number that each point should look up into, you could get a really beautifully offset animated growth pattern for all of those proxies. And from what I've seen, you would think like, okay, if you have a hundred frames, that's a hundred different proxies. And if they're all time offset from one another, that's redshift loading over a hundred different trees. you might run into a performance issue where it's unpacking because if it's unpacking one instance of a still frame of a tree then you're golden because this is just one tree. But when you start if you have a very long animation with lots of offsetting then you're loading potentially hundreds of different versions of the same tree and that might lead to a situation where performance might chug a little bit but from what I've seen it actually does a great job with all that stuff too. I mean it's just a matter of pushing it as far as you can until it breaks but yes adding animation on as a frame attribute that looks up into a directory and chooses which redshift proxy file that grab and throw into your scene, it totally works. We were doing a project that involved a bunch of floral blooms around a person and the shot never ended up getting used, but we had used methods similar to this where we had rigged a bunch of flowers and we built a blooming animation for each flower and then we had an attribute kind of trigger the beginning of when that animation should start on an instancing setup that looked up on disk, which frame of the animation to play and when, and you get this nice cascading effect of flowers that are kind of growing in a trail, one after another. It's like extremely powerful how the instancing setup works. It's just the only downside is it can be really kind of a pain to set up because it involves you writing out instance file attributes, modifying instance file attributes and like tweaking with like frame numbers and figuring out how that triggering offset stuff works. That can be a little bit tricky, but it's totally doable. That's really exciting. Yeah, I mean, I would say like, if you had a 60 frame animation of a wind system blowing through these trees and you wanted to like select a, and it was looping for whatever reason, and you wanted to select a random offset, you could probably get away with having thousands of them still and seen, even though it's picking one frame of 60 different frames of that animation. It's really, it's pretty insane how much, how the instancing works. And I, you know, I do want to get more into karma and USD and figuring out how those work for those work. But I haven't had a chance to fully adopt it yet just because of working in like a production scenario at a studio where everyone's using Redshift. Yeah, I mean, do you personally even need to learn as a teacher? I do because I want to use free tools like what's native in Houdini. So I have to learn and yeah, but that was kind of like one of the reasons why I didn't want to get too heavy into the rendering for this is because I know not everybody has Redshift. That's okay. A lot of people do. Yeah. Hopefully the, hopefully the material setup is basic enough that anyone be able to, anyone who knows how to apply materials should be able to do it. The concepts are so similar and we do have a question about exporting to Unreal. I think because Unreal has its own shading, right? Unless you would bake everything onto the tree. I am not sure. Yeah, any Unreal people here that could, I mean, I know there's a way because there's always a way. There is. And I think that a lot of these tools are originally, like the labs, the labs tools themselves used to be called the game dev tool set. So I think that a lot of the intent behind a lot of these things is to generate stuff, you know, for games. Right. And, and because of Houdini engine, you should be, I wonder if you just bring the lab, the tree tool, literally straight in as a HDA. Make a giant HDA out of it with the randomization parameter on there and just have it be like, boom, different tree. Like, yeah, wrap it all up, put it into Unreal. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, that's amazing. Homework for someone. Bring it next week. Yeah, you can even bring in like PDG into the HDA and like bring the whole setup. as the HDA inside Unreal and randomize all the trees. It's your assignment now. Why speak always at the wrong moment. Yeah, exactly. You did it to yourself. You did it to yourself. Now, this is super exciting. Any other questions from anybody? Did the stream work out better after? Oh, yeah. It was like, yeah. And don't worry about, you know, the beginning. These are live classes. So that's part of the fun. Is that little things like that happen? Yeah. So no, you did great and you're such a good public speaker. Wow. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, you're a natural for sure. The pacing is great. Yeah, really good. Really, really good. Okay, cool. Yeah, my wife told me last night that I was was going a little fast, but I don't think she I was. Is she a Houdini artist? Your wife? No, I was asking her. I'm like, do you want a laptop? You can follow along. You know, and she's like, no, I've never even touched Houdini before. Yeah. No, she, yeah, 3D isn't necessarily her thing. She does like, she does do some graphics work, though, with making shirts and stuff like that. OK, that's cool. Yeah, this is so design-y. And I think the pacing was perfect. And also we have the videos, so people can always go back. And it's very playful. Was anyone following along as he was teaching? I made it to where I didn't have the textures. That's pretty good. I actually rendered the full tree. Oh, of course he did. Oh, man. Nice. What a showoff. Very fun to see Mark in person, because I actually started learning Houdini back when I was learning from Stop Being Afraid of Houdini. That's excellent. Yeah. Yeah, Mark has a lot of tutorials out. So, and yeah, if anyone did follow along, please post in the actual channel for this class, because we'd love to see what you did. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to see people actually make stuff. I mean, if you have time, I know everyone's busy, But it's so fun to see everyone's work. And I haven't been strict with homework. As if it's totally optional. But that's how you learn. This is just the first part of learning. And the real meat of learning happens when you practice. So yeah, thank you so much, Mark. Any last minute questions before we say goodbye? No? Thank you all so much for checking it out. And there was a thrill ride. Yeah, right? I'm glad the internet ended up working out okay. And I will make sure that I can hard line next week without any license issues. It worked out perfectly. And thank you so much for teaching live to all of us. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I know it's a little heartbreaking. Super cool. Thank you so much, Mark. Yeah, thanks so much. And have a great day, everyone. Thank you next week. Thank you. Bye. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye"
+    }
+  ]
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