Making proper conifers with speedtree? Default textures looks terrible.

Pioldes

Hi, I'm trying to do a little winter scene but I'm running into one major problem. The conifers (pine trees and such) I did with Speedtree look very bad





Anybody would have some tips and/or tutorials? I'm starting to know Speedtree pretty well, but honestly, I reeeaaally can't seem to manage having acceptable-looking pine trees.


I've thought about doing my own from scratch, but I'm having a lot of trouble finding proper conifer branches for textures and such.

blankslatejoe

Well, I'll say this: there's a reason you don't see them as much in games. The needles/leaves of a conifer are hard as crap to get looking right without things feeling reeeealy noisy---and throwing snow into the problems even more complex.

Here's some a pal of mine made for Project Cop: https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/458060_3781910060010_428528466_o.jpg

Even though those are cartoony and christmas-y, the big concepts might translate over. He told me that when trying to get the look right it was helpful to exaggerate the needle size a bit to help with the noisy alpha problem (they made the littler needles into bigger 'clusters' of needles to help here), also don't use camera-facing leaves, think of the leaves a 'shell' and the trunk itself doesnt have much close up (except sub-fronds of branches) and, finally, building out the leaf clusters in 'levels' or 'tiers' can really help sell the layered look without going crazy on the tri count. It ends up with a more stylized look, but looked pretty cool when he did it at least. Goodluck!

Pioldes

Thanks!

I was trying to have a proper environment setup for the Montreal Internation Games Summit Career Fair, but I think that I might just take a shot at an interior environment for now, I have a pretty fast props workflow, I think I could manage that faster than proper outdoor scenery.

I'm not giving up on this idea though.

The screenshot looks really great, by the way, loving the art style

Santewi

Billboards won't work for needles. You could use a curved plane with a texture such as this applied to it.

Xendance

Santewi wrote: »

Billboards won't work for needles. You could use a curved plane with a texture such as this applied to it.

That works if you're making spruces and such. Try making a scots pine, now that's hard :P

Anyway, 300 DPI displays would surely help with the shimmering effect when using needle billboard textures. One can hope displays like that are standard some day....