Baking alpha cards to low poly for vegetation
Hi Guys!
First post on the forum but have been browsing for a little while. People seem very helpful and knowledgable, learnt a lot from just reading posts on here.
Now to my question. I am trying to create some low poly vegetation by baking alpha cards down to a single square texture. I have already done this with just the diffuse and had really good results with it. The final thing I wanted to add was also baking the normal map so you can get all of the variations in how the light hits the branches. However, I have run into an issue I didn't anticipate.
Above you can see my alpha cards stacked together to create a larger clump (this is to easily showcase and is not the texture I will be using in the end)
However, because these are just alpha planes the baker doesn't let rays pass through the transparent parts of the texture resulting in clear squares on the normal map and a lot of branches being obscured by the cards in front.
Is there any way to avoid what is seen on this normal map below? How would this be done in the industry if it isn't baking the detail down like this? Would people create trees with each needle and small stick modelled and then baked down to alpha cards?
Thanks for your time!
Karl
First post on the forum but have been browsing for a little while. People seem very helpful and knowledgable, learnt a lot from just reading posts on here.
Now to my question. I am trying to create some low poly vegetation by baking alpha cards down to a single square texture. I have already done this with just the diffuse and had really good results with it. The final thing I wanted to add was also baking the normal map so you can get all of the variations in how the light hits the branches. However, I have run into an issue I didn't anticipate.
Above you can see my alpha cards stacked together to create a larger clump (this is to easily showcase and is not the texture I will be using in the end)
However, because these are just alpha planes the baker doesn't let rays pass through the transparent parts of the texture resulting in clear squares on the normal map and a lot of branches being obscured by the cards in front.
Is there any way to avoid what is seen on this normal map below? How would this be done in the industry if it isn't baking the detail down like this? Would people create trees with each needle and small stick modelled and then baked down to alpha cards?
Thanks for your time!
Karl
Replies
Simplygon can bake through alpha so will do what you want but I'm not sure how accessible that is to a home user.
Most studios use speedtree for foliage so generally will just use a variety of flat cards and let speedtree handle the Lodding - it's horrible software but it's the best option on the market.
I will have a look for the thread and will also look at Simplygon to see if it is worth it. The only other idea I have is to cut out the branches in the geometry based on the alpha. This would, of course, increase the polycount extremely which I guess wouldn't be too bad as it is the high poly but might give me performance issues.
Yea I gave the free trial of Speedtree a shot and although it did seem to solve this issue I absolutely hated the interface and since the pricing was a bit steep for my uses I decided it wasn't worth it.
Again, thanks for the help!
Fwiw we make full detail branches with modelled leaves etc to bake down. You get better results and it means you have a library of stuff for the next project that can be rebaked at higher resolution.
I have thought of doing full detail branches but I came to the conclusion it would be overkill for my purposes anyway. We are very limited on both poly count and texture resolution so most of the detail would be lost regardless.