Spooky Tree (WIP)

NanaD

Hello all!

I am working on a spooky tree, this is my first attempt at sculpting a high poly mesh and baking the normals, I'm pleased I was able to get the normals working on my low-poly mesh, but I know it needs a lot of work.

Right now the low-poly mesh is 2693 tri's and I'm using a 1024 texture. I think I might need to bump up the poly count because it still looks boxy even with the normal map on. I was also wondering if upping the poly count might make my normal maps appear crisper?

I would appreciate any feedback at all.

TheSplash

Cool idea for a normal map test, it would be nice if you could show a larger and closer render to show the details better.

The normal map will not get rid the boxy silhouette, only adding more geometry will.

The silhouette looks pretty good how it is, perhaps just shifting some of the divisions from straight areas towards the bends and adding a couple more rings of will help with the more boxy areas.

With that said, you could probably remove a lot of polygons as well, the face and roots things for instance should get a lot of form from the normal map as they don't stick out from the surface much.

Adding more polys will not make your normal maps appear crisper, only increasing the resolution of the normal map will do that.
Also making good use of UV space helps with all aspects of texture resolution

NanaD

Thanks for the feedback, I took out a lot of the unnecessary polygons in the face and roots, and moved the polygons around in the branches to make the curves look smoother.

I have to re-do the uvs, but here is how the mesh is looking now.


Thanks again TheSplash, I'll post a close up of the normals as soon as I get the uvs fixed.

NanaD

Alright I worked the uvs and sculpt more, this is how its looking now:

Close-ups:



I'm planning on putting this tree into an UT3 mod I'm building, they will be one of the main sources of light in the level (its night-time in the level), so I did some renders with a darker background to see how the tree looked:



I increased the texture size to 2048x2048 since all the polygons required unique uv space for the normals. Do you think that is appropriate for this asset? The tree is 12ft tall, twice the side of a character.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

TheWinterLord

2048x2048 maybe if its the main character :P

I think you would have to make a tiling texture 256*256 and then a rad texture 512 to 1024 where you could paint out more details. then a texture for the face, its all modeled in already so the texture can be quite small.