Creating Palm Trees

I am now going to create some palm trees for my landscape using Maya and Photoshop.  I started by creating a simple tree trunk in Maya using a cylinder, I then shaped it to look more like a tree trunk rather than just a standard cylinder using the sculpting tools in Maya.  After this I then then applied a texture to it to make it look like an actual tree trunk rather that just the default grey colour of the objects in Maya. I then got a palm tree leaf texture and opened it up in Photoshop, once I had done this I applied an alpha channel to my leaf so that there would be no halo effect resulting in a white outline around the leaf, I then exported my leaf into Maya and made a couple of variations on the shapes of the leaves using the sculpting tools in Maya which allowed me to adjust the angle, size, scale and rotation of my palm leaf, I then, I then made eight different variations of palm trees by creating 7 new tree trunks of different shapes and sizes and duplicated my palm leaves and adjusted the rotation of my leaves when placing them on the tree trunks as you can see below.



Here you can see my eight palm trees, I am very happy with how these turned out, while they are eight completely different models, I could have still made more of an effort to make they look more different, however overall I am very happy with this.

One thing I have learned however is when exporting anything from Maya always centre your model otherwise the pivot will be out of place in UE4.