3D petals for Game engine issues Help needed

Mossbros

I've been making this 3D model of a sunflower but I wasn't to sure of how to go about making the petals for a game engine, I don't have much experience in this area and finding out about things like this on the internet is such a pain.

I've looked into billboards but this isn't the effect I want to achieve, it is in a sense but at the same time I don't want all the rotating effects.

What I would like to know is how I would go about this, I've tried creating a low poly version of the petals to bake the high poly down into but all that achieved is a lot of polys to deal with and messy normals.

At the moment I've tried a different method by basically using a cylinder to enclose the high poly petals and have tried baking the normals down onto it, but I lack the knowledge of how to make a mesh transparent within an engine so it looks like this at the moment. (ignore the bad normals on the pot I will fix them)



Low poly without normals



And High poly



I really appreciate the help!

Jerc

Apart from the fact that your petals would need more variation, having one or 2 secondary smaller layers on top of the first one may work better and break the apparent flatness of the petals.

Mossbros

Jerc wrote: »

Apart from the fact that your petals would need more variation, having one or 2 secondary smaller layers on top of the first one may work better and break the apparent flatness of the petals.

Thanks for the advice but I need help with making the unused area transparent, the flower is more of a test project.

Visceral

What i would do is to probably bake one petal on a small plane. im assuming since you put so much effort into this one mesh that its supposed to be some kind of a hero mesh like directly in the front of the camera or like in the main menu or something.

anyhow, since its important i would use thoose planes and place manually around the flower head. dont forget about size variation and placement shouldnt be perfect.

Mossbros

Visceral wrote: »

What i would do is to probably bake one petal on a small plane. im assuming since you put so much effort into this one mesh that its supposed to be some kind of a hero mesh like directly in the front of the camera or like in the main menu or something.

anyhow, since its important i would use thoose planes and place manually around the flower head. dont forget about size variation and placement shouldnt be perfect.

Thanks for the help, I'll give that a go and see how that turns out

MikeF

if you're baking this out in maya then just render a transparency map at the same time as your hp/lp bake and it should give you a good alpha map that follows the hp silhouette.

As for the game engine integration, what are you using?

Regardless of the particular engine though, there should be some default shaders with a separate transparency input, or in some cases it is combined into the alpha channel of the diffuse.

Mossbros

MikeF wrote: »

if you're baking this out in maya then just render a transparency map at the same time as your hp/lp bake and it should give you a good alpha map that follows the hp silhouette.

As for the game engine integration, what are you using?

Regardless of the particular engine though, there should be some default shaders with a separate transparency input, or in some cases it is combined into the alpha channel of the diffuse.

I'm trying this with marmoset but can't seem to get this working, the alpha is baked but I'm not sure what slot it would go into.

Mossbros

Mossbros wrote: »

I'm trying this with marmoset but can't seem to get this working, the alpha is baked but I'm not sure what slot it would go into.

Scratch that... I figured out the diffuse channel in Marmoset holds the alpha transparency, I was messing with the translucency