Easier way to transform leaves for tree textures?
polycounter lvl 8
Making a tree texture. Transforming, warping, puppet warping.. leaves duplicating them... it's a tedious and arduous process. Anyone have any better methods? maybe in photoshop zbrush or otherwise?
Replies
If you want something faster you could try some procedural placement/scattering method in your 3D app with your insert mesh, for example something like NanoMesh in ZBrush. I've not attempted this though. May require you to do some cleanup to remove extra leaves you don't want but you can just select them whole and delete them... may not be too bad.
Some paint programs have an "image hose" feature that will let you image stamps and spray them out with a brush. I don't think photoshop has this though and to be honest the quality probably wouldn't be great doing that.
@Eric Chadwick That's an awesome idea, thanks!
Speedtree is quite powerful and much faster then manual modelling methods. Takes some time getting used to and learn all the tricks but well worth it when you plan to do a lot of foliage for your game. Doing LOD's is a breeze. As for customization, you have the option to either import custom meshes/textures, generate them or use a mix of both. For your leaf textures you can tweak branch number and distribution, leaf density, position, color variation, vertex normals etc. and bake it down to a texture directly inside speedtree.