i'm not an arborist myself but I wonder if maybe another texture or two with some differently rotated leaves, plus just a little more variation in the cards rotation would give more realism. Just seems like I can see a little too much of a pattern in the placement.
Light coming from above with the translucent leaves looks great. The hue and saturation of the leaves feels a touch stylized to me. Not that they look unrealistic -- just very uniform in color. Totalyl fine if that's what you were going for. For photorealism I find that getting more layers of variation in color and roughness and value usually goes a long way.
I think not to long ago you were jsut starting out with some trees and close to pulling your hair out over it... not you've got something pretty legit. Got to respect that hustle, dawg. Keep em coming.
i'm not an arborist myself but I wonder if maybe another texture or two with some differently rotated leaves, plus just a little more variation in the cards rotation would give more realism. Just seems like I can see a little too much of a pattern in the placement.
Light coming from above with the translucent leaves looks great. The hue and saturation of the leaves feels a touch stylized to me. Not that they look unrealistic -- just very uniform in color. Totalyl fine if that's what you were going for. For photorealism I find that getting more layers of variation in color and roughness and value usually goes a long way.
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Thank you!! ^0^
It's odd you even mention photorealism, this whole thing was just a big test to see whether I could actually manage to craft a tree that would look *right*; and when I say right, I mean with the right distribution of volumes and shapes. The whole thing is handmade, from the bark of the trunk (quite patent) to the colours/details of the leafs. The normal map that makes the leafs look so "realistic"? Just a highpoly sculpt in Blender. Colours are baked vertex colours, hand-painted.
I did think about making a couple of different branches, but I was still trying to define a workflow and I decided spending too much time on that stage could've proved to be a waste of energies.
I had an idea of how I wanted the tree to look like and what features it had to have. And yes, you remember correctly, I was banging my head on this thing really hard. Then a friend gave me the spark and I got a nice idea for giving volume to the cards while retaining the impression that the branch is a single piece of "organic ramifications". ^^
Honestly, I'm more surprised than you that it looks so good, I feel like I could actually pat my own shoulder and congratulate to myself for such a nice result. x)
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It's odd you even mention photorealism, this whole thing was just a big test to see whether I could actually manage to craft a tree that would look *right*; and when I say right, I mean with the right distribution of volumes and shapes.
The whole thing is handmade, from the bark of the trunk (quite patent) to the colours/details of the leafs. The normal map that makes the leafs look so "realistic"? Just a highpoly sculpt in Blender. Colours are baked vertex colours, hand-painted.
I did think about making a couple of different branches, but I was still trying to define a workflow and I decided spending too much time on that stage could've proved to be a waste of energies.
I had an idea of how I wanted the tree to look like and what features it had to have.
And yes, you remember correctly, I was banging my head on this thing really hard. Then a friend gave me the spark and I got a nice idea for giving volume to the cards while retaining the impression that the branch is a single piece of "organic ramifications". ^^
Honestly, I'm more surprised than you that it looks so good, I feel like I could actually pat my own shoulder and congratulate to myself for such a nice result. x)