Trees in LightWave

Most trees in the games were made and rendered with LightWave. This is different from how most objects were made, which were modeled and animated in LightWave, but rendered in other software. A tutorial from Dave Jerrard explains the process of making trees in LightWave, this process was used by Simon Foster as well. The tutorial shows the usage of particles for the leaves, which are made of textured spheres with random displacement.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130225064555/http://www.animationartist.com/2000/Tutorials/LWTrees/lwtrees.html#

I rendered all the trees in Lightwave using this technique by Dave Gerrard - http://www.animationartist.com/2000/Tutorials/LWTrees/lwtrees.html .I'm sure some of it, at least, can be adapted to Max. For the different sizes I just scaled the trees up & rendered in 4 different 90 degree angles for each, For the density of the foliage I adjusted how much if each polygon that made up the leaves got rendered.

One thing I would say is that I couldn't exclude the background colour from the renders in Lightwave, I found that rendering against black gave me too dark an edge to the images. Rendering against a green or magenta background gave horrible anti aliasing fringing problems. In the end I settled on red 57, green 59, blue 57 for my RGB values. The green 59 was there so that when I magic wanded away the background to transparent, I didn't also lift out any pure grey values of 57/57/57.

Simon Foster - YouTube