Foliage Project
polycounter lvl 3
This project will be covering my first expedition into learning to produce game ready foliage by hand, throughout this blog I will be covering what actions I took to produce all the foliage in the scene and also how I overcame any of the problems that I encountered. For this project, I will be learning deeper into different software such as 3ds max and also substance suit. I would love to hear any and all feedback on how to improve my work or workflow.
Replies
Here's some resources to get you started;
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage - Polycount wiki specifically for foliage. There's some really cool projects in here and the forums go into workflows and techniques and such.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z4v5N - Protege Foliage Tutorial by Peyton Varney. Incredibly workflow and great breakdown, should take you through all the steps quite nicely.
https://gumroad.com/l/vuUUX - Karen Stanley's Foliage Tut. Slightly different workflow to Peyton's, but it's all good to know.
As for the tree's, I recommend picking up something like Speedtree if you can get access to academic licenses. It's a lot easier to put trees together than in a conventional modelling package.
Good luck!
update on the project so far.
I have spent about the day and a half trying to improve the grass and small branches as it was not as high quality as I strived for, after looking at more of the recourses from @JonJo I was able to figure out that my main problem was due to the density that I had.
grass, it was very noticeable that It was a plane and this was resolved after spending some of the time reducing the density of the grass blades on the texture.
branches, I began to duplicate the smaller branches more to make them look less barren making sure to reduce the amount as I went up the tree, this worked well when optimising the trees.
I have begun looking into speed tree as well, but I think I will aim to complete the first tree using purely the tools I know so I can use it to further my knowledge on the programs.
I began developing the materials more as well for this, I set up a landscape material and produced two different variants of dirt, one with water and one without. I also am thinking about making one with leaves and twigs on, but I could also use textured planes to produce the same effect with more control, I think I will need to look more into what the processing cost is and see which one will be better.
for the next two days, my main aims will be producing a texture atlas for ground foliage using substance designer and then adding the current textures onto it. this should then bring me to the stage where I can start composing the scene and study lighting and effects more for open environments.
now we're onto one of the last updates for this project with only thew tweaks to go in terms of assets, I was able to fully produce a ground foliage texture atlas with the use of substance designer and merging it with some of the other textures in the scene , when looking for help with lighting I looked at multiple resources from channels like quixel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoY062kY1s) and Unreal Engine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd7-rTzfmCo&t=829s) this has given me a firm base in terms of the lighting setup, but I still believe that I could use the lighting more to break up some of the forms in the scene.
your completely right thanks for the feedback, I've just gone and changed it now
Here is my final post for this project, thank you for all the feedback, it has helped me a lot to push my art and now its time to move onto the next project
it's just as Badhacks says, I have mainly stopped the project at this point as I am suffering from burn out at the moment, for my first attempt at foliage I am quite proud with what I have produced and I have loved every second of making it I know there are still many adjustments I could make and I will most likely revisit this project in the near future to attempt to tackle them .
my main fear at the moment is the quality of work falling but I will still be looking into the foliage as I move onto my next project, where I can focus on interiors more.