SpeedTreeCad Lite tutorial?

[pseudonym]

Can anyone direct me to a beginners tutorial for SpeedTreeCad Lite 4.0 please? I've looked everywhere for hours but there is almost no documentation for this program and any that I can find seems to be only bits and pieces. I basically need a tutorial that starts a completely new tree and goes through everything required to get that tree to work in oblivion. any help would be appreciated and if I manage any decent trees I will release them for anyone to use. please help! I am fast becoming disillusioned and am losing hope for my much needed custom trees, which leads to my potential mod failing since its hard to have a forest with no trees, lol

[Lady Nerevar]

i don't know about lite, but i believe the full version comes with its own documentation. i don't know of any tutorials specific to oblivion however - usually, as long as you keep all the files in the same structure as Oblvion had it, you have a pretty good chance of the tree working in game.

all in all, speed tree is pretty self explanatory. i would just spend a day or two messing around with the numbers figuring out how to achieve the effect you want. of course, the easiest way to make a new tree is import one that already looks pretty similar and then adjust the values slightly.

[morcroft]

First thing - as Lady N says, don't start with a new tree. With Lite you can't edit the collision or composite textures, so you need to pick a game tree you like, replace the leaf textures and morph it into shape. Apart from that, the help in my Lite 3.4 has a pretty good tutorial. Oblivion doesn't support any freatures from later versions anyway.

[Lady Nerevar]

btw, while were here, any idea why all my trees export with their leaves at the bottom of the trunk instead of the branches? this happens even when i don't change anything in a vanilla tree.

[morcroft]

No - that's weird. Are you editing a tree with a single leaf texture or one with several leaf clusters? Does your Speedtree let you get at the composite textures? I eventually worked out how to split out the textures into separate tgas so 3.4 Lite could use them and that's working OK.

[pseudonym]

ahhh ok, didnt know the new tree problem. I can create trees ok but they dont seem to work in the cs at all, the only thing that says anything is there at all is the transform tool and a ref in the cell view box. I'll try editing an existing tree and see how I go. thanks for the suggestions

[morcroft]

Make sure you have a billboard before you create the tree in the cs - it has to have the same name as the tree and the cs will crash without it.
Take a look at Razorwing's How to create billboards for Oblivion SpeedTree tree
The leaf texture actually used in-game is the one assigned in the cs: the ones from speedtree are ignored - but you need to create fake texture files for speedtree to use, otherwise you just get the texture not found image. You can find out the names speedtree wants by text-editing the .spt. Paths are ignored in spts.
Paths matter to the cs: I think you need to use the same subdirectories for textures as you use for your .spt - except for branch textures which must all be in textures\trees\branches.