foliage shading question.

supremedalek925

Hey there. I was hoping someone could help me out with getting my leaf shader in a better place.

As you can see, right now the shadows are too dark and ugly.
This is my material.

I have tangent space normals unchecked, emissive checked, and shading model set to subsurface, although I'm not really sure in what way any of these affect the shadowing. Any advice is much appreciated.

programmer23

I honestly have no idea how to fix this but I know they added a new foliage shader in the latest unreal release. I would look at that

supremedalek925

programmer23 wrote: »

I honestly have no idea how to fix this but I know they added a new foliage shader in the latest unreal release. I would look at that

Thanks although I haven't been able to find any documentation yet on foliage shading.

JordanN

If you're using subsurface scattering, you need to plug in a value for the opacity channel. I believe 1 is completely opaque and 0 is complete translucent and 0.5 is semi-transparent.

You also want to check the strength of your light source. A very bright lightsource makes the SSS more obvious whereas a weaker or duller light source makes the SSS look more subtle.

You can also add more lights into a scene or bake out lightmaps to get secondary bounces in your shadows.

Nosslak

To fix the harsh shadows you'll need to modify your vertex normals so that they're pointing outwards from a tree. The workflow will be different from program to program, but you'll probably want to either bake the vnormals from a sphere or use a modifier.
Modifying the vnormals is no magic bullet though, if you want a truly great tree you'll need to make the canopy a lot denser.

Jakob Gavelli

I got this problem when baking lighting. If you get this problem when baking you need to make sure Dynamic Cascaded Shadows aren't set to 0, in your Directional Light.

supremedalek925

Thanks for the tips. I think it's looking a little better now. I switched to the 2 sided foliage shading option too. I think once I adjust my normals it should look a lot better. I've never baked vertex normals but I think I should be able to figure it out without a problem; I'm using Maya 2014. I also plugged in a value for the alpha channel but I did not notice a difference.

Joopson

The texture and the planes are a bigger issue than the shader, as it stands. Try to have more empty space in between the leaves on the texture. When they're all grouped together, it becomes too obvious that they're just a plane with a texture.

supremedalek925

I fixed the vertex normals but I'm still getting ugly shadows. I noticed it looks like it might have to do with the subsurface scattering because when I adjust that value, the shaded areas change, but even when I multiply my diffuse texture with a light color for the ss the shadows still come out this dark.

supremedalek925

Here's an update.