Does anyone know of any tutorials on re-texturing trees?

Looking for information on Leaves and level of detail, billboards, mip maps, dxt compression .... anything relevant to just texture replacement.

I had a good nosy around TESAlliance but if its there I missed it, cant seem to find anything on the CS Wiki either.

This, as far as I know: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23783

I don't use it myself though. I like Oblivion's default textures

Well I suppose taking that to pieces may suffice as a tutorial

It certainly looks comprehensive, just surprised I have not seen anything around that covers the topic.

I don't recall where I found the information but;

Leaves: Save as DXT3 compression, include an alpha channel. No need for a normal map. If I remember right, this is the only texture the CS asks for.
Billboards: Same. This needs to be named exactly the same as the .spt model you're using for the game to find it.
Branches: No need to touch these as they are hardcoded and can't be changed.

What I do is pull a leaves and billboard texture out of the bsa, and play with it, either recolouring or retexturing the leaves and/or flowers. That way it remains in the same proportion that's required. One texture can contain two or three parts of the tree. The alpha channel is to mask out the background.

(shameless plug: The new peach trees in Cheydinhal OCR)

Thank you Hanaisse, .spt rings a bell after todays searches, I saw that mentioned in an old blender forum after a search on google - relevant to something called speedtree I think, they were talking about billboards and halo (not the game but the way leaves will always face the player as if stuck on the end of the branch through the centre with a pin allowing the leaves to look at you even if directly below them - as opposed to billboards in the distance which will just rotate around the z axis to face the player).


I have just been searching for Cheydinhal OCR :facepalm: One of these days I will get round to installing Open Cities Reborn ... http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/33003-1-1301898285.jpg

Well, you could go outside pick some leaves and scan them. I've done that before.
pictures of trunks for bark, etc...

If you don't have a scanner set up, you could always use textures from sites such as CGtextures.

You,ll notice that most of the trees textures have more than one leaf in the texture also.

You also should know a bit about UV mapping also. This will ease the process.

Treed is a simple program that will make a simple tree mesh for you also.