3D Vegetation

Loren Broach

I've never made any sort of 3D plant before so I was hoping to get some pointers (or a tutorial someone knows about). The picture below is my attempts, the ref is what I want to accomplish. Can anyone help me?



Sorry if this question has been posted before I looked around for an existing thread but didn't find any.

MoP

I would use bigger planes than that, currently it looks way too poly-heavy and you'd get lots of alpha overdraw in a game engine (which is generally bad).

Use fewer, larger planes, don't necessarily keep them as perfect quads, you can often fit more detail into a texture and model that way.

Also your texture gets very washed out and white near the leaf tips, you should try to avoid that, also try to get more subtle colour variation into the leaves, at the moment it looks like a mass of washed-out green.

animatr

it looks to me as if you could make a poly object the has the silhouette of the mass of vegetation and have alpha planes coming out of it to break up that silhouette. did that make any sense?

edited for spelling

Mark Dygert

When you stack up transparencies this much it is generally a good idea to not feather your opacity map/alpha, it will cause all kinds of headaches in most engines when it tries to sort out what is visible and what the shadows will look like. But opacity maps/alphas that use only B/W (no shades of gray) will be easy for the engines to sort.

Animatr brought up a good idea and that is how I would try and handle this particular piece. Saving the opacity maps for the silhouette.

Rob Galanakis

Setting all your normals to face straight up can also help fix lighting.

Jesse Moody

exactly what animatr said....probably the best solution for this piece.

If you have gears for pc look at the stuff in there.

Loren Broach

awesome, thanks for the feedback that makes much more sense than my approach. We'll see how this goes!

System

Personally I would approach this with planes aswell but slightly differently to the way you have here, just make the planes longer and with a few divisions and taper them using soft selection to a similar formation to what you see naturally. Here's a rough example...