Evironment; Need Help

salman_fas

Hi Polycounters,

I started working on this scene, I am kinda lost with where to go next, as you can see I have blocked out some shapes. I am also having problems trying to get the tree leaves to look right.

Decal pass will come much later.

Any ideas/paint overs are highly appreciated. Thanks

garriola83

you need to block out more, and use references before you get into detail like texturing or details like leaves.
also ask yourself what kind of project is this. if this is a level, definitely block out everything first, but for a render, use references and go from there.
a little backstory wouldnt hurt as to how to paintover this.

Alec3d

maybe google some refs for what kind of atmosphere or environment your going for to get some direction.

crazyfingers

Hope this helps, this is my second go at tree flora:

These are very preliminary shots and a lot of the leaves could be better rotated and placed, but these shots might actually be more effective in showing how the leaves help fill out the trees. You can compare the flushed out areas with the unfinished ones and see you really don't need much branch detail when creating the trees.







Drew a lot of inspiration from UT3 (how i want to animate the leaves in the UT3 engine) and from Left4Dead (the basic look of the trees)

The trick is to get a good looking set of leaves with a single branch running off the end, the stems can be very basic, but the leaves have to look good. The opacity map can be a little tricky, if you're getting residue around the edges, use a select by color range, isolate the outside and fill that area on a new layer, then slap a stroke on it to blast away the residue.

The geo's pretty self explanitory, you don't want a plane obviously, i found the point at the top adds the best silhouette since you'll almost surely be seeing the leaves from the side or below. You might want to choose a different shape if you're doing aerial shots, make it more of a curve.

The solo leaf on the left side of the texture is for fallen leaves. that i want to scatter about. there's room for more fallen leaves above it in the future as i move forward.

Once you place a single set of leaves on a tree, just duplicate it and offset it a bit, create a "bunch" of leaves. Then you can just duplicate that bunch, maybe 4 sets of leaves that are a different in scale, rotation, and position. Once you've finished a single tree, you can just duplicate that and put an FFD modifier on it and augment that. It's best to start with a very generic straight standing tree, and then deform it with modifiers once you're done to add character for future trees.

*quick addition* There's a reason for the extra room on the edges of the tree leaves, since i want to do a panner modifier on the texture which fakes trees blowing in the wind, if you were to pan the texture and there wasn't extra room on the outside, you would see superfluous textures at the edges of your leaf geo as it moved about, hence the extra breathing room.

Another quick addition: That was an earlier version of the tree leaf diffuse, didn't use the current version because I thought it might be be too confusing. I'm glad SHEPEIRO posted though because i didn't note this. The texture above isn't a good example of a diffuse, but neither is my current texture, but it does show you can play with the texture a bit once you're done and get ok results without being too anal about it looking good, the opacity map will clean it up:

This is all still a work in progress so don't take these as 100% perfect... but when does a large scale project ever come out 100% perfect?

SHEPEIRO

i think your doing alright, but where are your refs and concepts, do them now befor get too lost, make a mood board that sort of thing.

trees- build them in components starting from the smallest till you get a full tree, by this i mean
-get some good shots of leaves ( yours look a little too played with try going and photographing some)
-get those nice and clean, maybe if your having trouble painting a whole branch, put the leaves on planes and models abranch to put them on then render it out, maybe a couple on the same sheet.
- add these small plane branches onto a variation of larger modeled branches
- add these in different formations to a trunk.
build them this way and youll be surprised how many variations you can make quickly

salman_fas

Hey thanks guys, I was definitely leaving the most crucial steps of blocking out, here is a little update. As for the look I am aiming for a recently abandoned place/minor to no damage. Just played Gears 2 so I am trying to achieve that kind of feel in lighting and atmosphere(it won't be as detailed though). Also I want to keep this project small so i can actually get it done.

Crazyfinger, Shepeiro I will keep these techniques in mind when I will start back on the trees. Really great info thanks for sharing.