What's the current best tree leaf/ branch workflow?
polycounter lvl 8
Hi there, I'm having a bit of trouble with some trees I'm creating for Unreal 4. Just to summarise to clear a few things up;
- I've hand sculpted the tree trunks using Zbrush.
- I'm not using Speed Tree. My game has a particular aesthetic style. It's also small in scope.
Thing is, I'm actually quite a seasoned modeller but I've never done foliage before. I've scoured the internet for a couple of days and I can't seem to pinpoint what I'm looking for.
Essentially, I'm trying to bake a high poly branch with leaves down to a plane for use on my tree. I understand the principles of baking normals and such but I can't find a decent tutorial that describes how to get all of my required maps in detail. I'm using Maya, and I've read I need to set up an orthographic viewport to project the branch onto a plane or something?
I'm wondering if the output diffuse is simply just Maya render from the viewport?
Not sure how to get my normals either? Is it simply a case of projecting using a planar cage in XNormal or something? Surely I'd have to make my branch a certain way for that work?
I can just paint the maps in photoshop but it looks terrible and my photo references never seem to come out good and look flat.
I've looked over the tutorials on polycount and they seem to give me a good look at an end result but no detail on how the actual maps were created.
Thanks
.
- I've hand sculpted the tree trunks using Zbrush.
- I'm not using Speed Tree. My game has a particular aesthetic style. It's also small in scope.
Thing is, I'm actually quite a seasoned modeller but I've never done foliage before. I've scoured the internet for a couple of days and I can't seem to pinpoint what I'm looking for.
Essentially, I'm trying to bake a high poly branch with leaves down to a plane for use on my tree. I understand the principles of baking normals and such but I can't find a decent tutorial that describes how to get all of my required maps in detail. I'm using Maya, and I've read I need to set up an orthographic viewport to project the branch onto a plane or something?
I'm wondering if the output diffuse is simply just Maya render from the viewport?
Not sure how to get my normals either? Is it simply a case of projecting using a planar cage in XNormal or something? Surely I'd have to make my branch a certain way for that work?
I can just paint the maps in photoshop but it looks terrible and my photo references never seem to come out good and look flat.
I've looked over the tutorials on polycount and they seem to give me a good look at an end result but no detail on how the actual maps were created.
Thanks
.
Replies
There's been a tutorial here where u take the normal direction from a sphere shell u add over the canopy of the tree in order to get the correct shading inside unreal engine. But i dunno if that's what ppl use these days.
Since you cant use the 2 sided material, cus it creates more faces and by doing that ruins the normals u baked down, or transfered.
So u need to create the backface on every plane needed. sadly this is not very optimized in the engine and causes lags with just a few trees sadly.
And i cant find an up to date tutorial on making a tree correctly without speedtree or any other tree generator.
So i am interested to hear what u found.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage
http://polycount.com/discussion/125920/correct-vertex-normals-for-foliage#latest
It was once in the wiki Eric posted but has been removed
What do you mean you can't use 2 sided materials? If you manually add the "backfaces" inside maya, won't the same amount of faces be rendered as if you were to use a 2 sided material? Also look into translucent shaders/materials for the leaves.
If you lag with only a few trees I would look into how many tris and how many materials each tree is using. You should try to keep material count down to 1, but with bigger trees 2 is okay (1 for leaves, 1 for bark)