Need foliage expert, my tree normals look terrible!

Kogoshi

I've been having this problem for a while now, trying to transfer normals from a sphere to my tree/canopy so it lights uniformly.

This is the process I'm trying to achieve:

So here is where I create a sphere, and transfer vertex position to make a perfect shell of the tree.

And this is what I get when I use this "shell" to transfer normal information to the tree mesh.

I feel like this should just edit all the normals to be facing outwards, but it just messes it up.

I have two sided lighting active, I've tried with hard/smooth normals (I imagine smooth is what I should be going for with foliage), I've deleted history and frozen transformations.

I even wiped my entire PC today and reinstalled everything, that's how desperate I was for this to work.

It's driving me mad, I must be doing something wrong - I just want to make nice low poly tree's for UE4 so I can get an environment portfolio together.

Can anyone help? thanks!  

EDIT: Solved! needed to delete history and clean outliner, noob mistake   

Here's the (almost) finished tree -

m4dcow

You only want to transfer the vertex normals for the actual foliage cards, and not the trunk and branches that have distinct geometry.

kwyjibo

In your top right screenshot, it looks cards which should be intersecting but not joined are joined such that you have more than two faces sharing the same edges.

Kogoshi

m4dcow said:

You only want to transfer the vertex normals for the actual foliage cards, and not the trunk and branches that have distinct geometry.

kwyjibo said:

In your top right screenshot, it looks cards which should be intersecting but not joined are joined such that you have more than two faces sharing the same edges.

I'm getting the same problem if I only transfer normals to the canopy, also with the canopy geo - I imitated the geometry of tree's from World of Warcraft to try and simulate their workflow so I would have thought the geo should be fine unless I screwed up somewhere.  

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62238920/Tree01.mb  Here's the mesh.  

m4dcow

Turn off two sided lighting in the viewport, it shades backfaces hard black. (lighting-two sided lighting)

Kogoshi

m4dcow said:

Turn off two sided lighting in the viewport, it shades backfaces hard black. (lighting-two sided lighting)

I did try this but didn't think it was supposed to look like that.  

I essentially just want it to look good, what am I doing wrong?

kwyjibo

I just had a look at your file. I had to import it as it was made in a student version of maya. You have all sorts of construction history on your objects as well as old transform node leftover from merging objects. Also as I wrote before, your foliage cards have merged center and corner vertices, causing single edges sharing up to four faces. In the screenshot with the process you're trying to emulate, the cards are simple overlapping quads with no centre vertices (You can see in the screenshot that there aren't edges where the quads intersect) and corner vertices which may or may not be merged. In your file, you've put in center vertices and have merged them which I believe is messing up your transfer normals. Another thing, your UVs are all messed up. Its probably better to set the UVs on one card before duplicating.

Kogoshi

kwyjibo said:

I just had a look at your file. I had to import it as it was made in a student version of maya. You have all sorts of construction history on your objects as well as old transform node leftover from merging objects. Also as I wrote before, your foliage cards have merged center and corner vertices, causing single edges sharing up to four faces. In the screenshot with the process you're trying to emulate, the cards are simple overlapping quads with no centre vertices (You can see in the screenshot that there aren't edges where the quads intersect) and corner vertices which may or may not be merged. In your file, you've put in center vertices and have merged them which I believe is messing up your transfer normals. Another thing, your UVs are all messed up. Its probably better to set the UVs on one card before duplicating.

Hi, thanks for this - yeah my history does seem to be a problem, I'm not great at keeping it clean, is there anything I need to do specifically or just freeze transformations and delete all extra nodes in outliner?  

Also with my foliage cards, I've actually copied the geometry from some tree's in world of warcraft so I thought the geo would be fine.  

What part of my UV's are messed up? I was thinking of painting the leaves again, this is really just a test model to see how this WoW card geo looks with the "normal theif" process.  

EDIT: I see what I did the the UV's, I must have tried deleting empty transform nodes in outliner without deleting history, fortunately I have a backup. 
Thanks again.  

musashidan

I though I recognised your 1st screenshot from somewhere

Kogoshi

I figured it out guys, thanks for the help!  I just needed to delete history and clean up my outliner (also uncheck 2-sided lighting)