Here is a tiny preview of what we are going to create...
I think the easiest way to start the tree is with the volcano terrain in the Mountains section of your Objects library. Click on the little arrow next to the word create at the top of the screen to access the library, then click on Mountains.
With the terrain selected, click on the little green button on the bottom to take the tree into "solo mode".
Click on the "e" button on the control strip to go into the terrain editor. Drag to the right on the erroded button until you see the center of the terrain turn light gray. Then hit the smoothing button about 5 times.
Move the slider next to the terrain editor up from the bottom until the entire black background has turned red. If you do not see the slider, click on the little white square next to the arrow at the top. Click on the check to exit out.
Now back in the grid you are going to click on the little "a" on the control strip. change the y in the size all the way at the bottom to 139. The sizes should now say 81- 139- 81. Check out of there and hit the / key one time on your keypad to make the terrain half the size so it is easier to work on. Click on the down arrow to ground it. You can always enlarge it again when you are done. Notice now since you enlarged the tree that you have alot of jagged edges on the trunk. Click on the "e" on the control strip again to go back into the terrain editor. Click on the smoothing button 4 or 5 times until it looks like the jaggies are smoothed down.
Check out. This is what you should have to this point.
Click on the "e" again. We are going to start on the roots. Now back to the slider, slide it back down to the bottom so the background is black again. We now need to adjust our tools that we are going to use to draw the roots. The top tool is the brush, you want that a nice size to draw some roots. You also have to adjust the color you are going to draw. White is very high, black is nothing, we are going to want a dark-medium gray which will be the second set of bars from the bottom. The last thing to change is the brush behavior. Click on the arrow and choose elevation. See below...
Now we are going to draw the roots. See in the picture above where the terrain spikes out at the bottom, those are good starting points for your roots. start at the trunk and work your way out, curving a bit like real roots would grow. When you have roots drawn around the entire base of the tree, hit the smoothing button about 10 times until your preview looks good to you. Then move the slider back up until the black is again red and check out of there.
You will now have something like this.
