This very weird tree

We had a new brief, and It was to create a tree! Yay! Like always I went crazy and started to look for references of weird species of trees, because I'm not happy enough with being behind everyone for taking too much time to do simple tasks, I have this urge to do something different and then sink in desperation and frustration.

But It's always fun. I accepted my own failure in handing things in time. Sometimes I have a breakdown. But it's fine.

I decided to create something like the Baobab tree.

I first heard of the Baobabs in a Sebastião Salgado exposition I visited in Brazil last year. I remember it caught my attention because of their absurd sizes and weird shapes: people use to live inside the Baoba trunk after the tree dies, because It's huge and holds thousands of liters of water inside of it. The most amazing thing I discovered was that the Baobab trees are actually immortal, they can be killed or die for the lack of sun or water, alright, but in the right circumstances It can live forever! That's insane. It's a tree. It probably knows all the secrets of the universe.

These are the most incredible trees I have ever seen

Now. I've been called up before for going too crazy and doing something far from the original brief, so I was a bit scared of modelling the whole tree and then have to make it all from scratch if the tutors didn't think It fitted, and I decided to go for a more common tree that could resemble the Baobab tree in some way.

It even has a little door!! Maybe a Jedi lives in there.

It took me a couple of hours to create all the branches. I first started to extrude the branches from the trunk and It was a really ungrateful task. It's hard to control the bevel and most of the times the vertexes and edges were totally messed up. Then I came across the line and Loft technique, which speeded up the process quite a lot! I had three main lines for the branches and just reused them over and over again just resizing the final loft to fit the tree.

Unwrapping was a nightmare. Not because It was difficult, not because I had to align everything. No. It was a nightmare because everytime I was close to finishing everything, I came across something wrong at the model. A face that shouldn't exist, double vertexes. And then I had to go back to the editable poly and START ALL THE UNWRAPPING AGAIN. I think I did that three times. I became a master in Baobab tree unwrap. Always check your models before unwrapping. Always.

Just like the rock, I used Pelt Unwrap and Relax in basically all the branches and the main trunk. Sometimes It didn't work so I had to use pins and do it manually. But It was a simple and fast task (If It wasn't for all the problems I had with the model).

I piled everything like this because I decided to create a tileable texture, since I had recently learned how to do It and wanted to try. The final piece should be a proper UV bitmap like the one below, but I guess I will still have some problems to pile them up to fill the whole space. I don't know if I should use the remaining space to the branches and leaves textures or just try to reorganize them better.

I started painting the tileable texture just like I did at the treasure chest, a continuous wood plank, but at the end I wasn't happy with It, mostly because It didn't look so much like a tree bark, so I decided to experiment a little bit more.

What happened, though, is that my texture was too detailed and in a macro view It's really noisy; after some feedback I decided to try something cleaner and go back to the wood planks to see what happens, turns out It looks way better now and It will probably be my final version!