Topiary

Meloncov

Does anyone know any resources on how best to handle dense topiary like this?



I was thinking a couple layers of planes with alphas and normals on them, but I wanted to check if there's a better way.

LMP

Depending on the target engine, I'd say at least a simple mesh and with a texture, and maybe leaf geometry attached to it. Or... if it's supported some fancy shader work to give the illusion of depth to it.

m4dcow

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=67620
This might be helpful

JustMeSR

There was some nice topiary in Dishonored art dump.

tungerz

Kent Trammell @ cg cookie has gone over it in blender with the ivy gen @ exercise and Tutorial.

Cheers,
~Tung

Meloncov

Sweet, thank you everyone!

Joost

You should check this out as well http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage

Mark Dygert

"Normal Thief" a 3dsmax script and "Slide Normal Thief" MEL for Maya, will help get the shading right on the clumps of planes. Eric Chadwick did a great write up on the wiki about it, lots of good animated examples.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/VertexNormal#Foliage_Shading

Basically you're aligning the normals of the jumbled up planes to a proxy object that has normals that are are a bit more uniform. Something kind of like this: