Ivy

knak47

I am going to do some ivy. And I want to know if what I have in mind is a good approach, and if the poly count would be fiesable for a 360 game.

So the ivy I am talking about would be at player height and around a doorway so I want it to look good. Higher up on the surrounding walls I will probably just use plains with the high res ivy projected onto it.

So my plan was to use the soulburn spline painter script for the main vines of the ivy. Obviously I will take the poly count on that down quite a bit. Then I was going to use the Max particle generator to sprout individual leaf tri's around. Is this an approach people are using. If not what is your approach. Thanks

toxic_h2o

I made ivy using just a hand painted texture and alpha cards, like Matroskin did in his romantic ruins.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=87751&highlight=romantic&page=2

Heres what I ended up with. Each card cluster probably has like 10-20 tris.

r_fletch_r

http://www.guruware.at/main/
this is insanely awesome

Ben Apuna

This thread is just for you: Ivy?

I've heard the newest version of Blender has a Ivy plugin too.

knak47

Thanks guys this is all great info.

Thanks for the link to that thread Ben. Thats weird, I didnt find that link when I typed in IVY in the first search bar. but once I was in the tech forum and typed it in it came up. I'll search better next time. Thanks a bunch guys.

Ben Apuna

No worries.

Sometimes Polycount's internal search works great, other times it's better to use google like this [noparse]site:http://www.polycount.com/forum/ ivy[/noparse]

knak47

I was following this Tut that EQ recomended

Originally posted by EarthQuake
[4. Followed the tutorial here: http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps11.shtml for setting up a special scene to render normals, red/green/blue light thing. That turned out to provide a pretty good normals map from just doing a standard scanline render with an ortho camera.
I used the method because i was having problems getting the alphas to work correctly using render to texture.]

My issue is that when i try what EQ said as far as just hitting render from an ortho view I get a lot of negative space, because it is taking into consideration all of the blank space surrounding my high poly and my lowpoly plane. What am I missing to get a render that is exactly a power of 2 and leaves that come out like EQs did? Because when I apply a white material the branches are fine because they are actual geometry but the leaves obviously just come out like cards.

knak47

Bump

Just rewriting my question, it was a little confusing.

Pay no attention to the leaf cards in the above screen shot. I assume I should just apply my normal texture to the diffuse slot to get my normals for the leaves.

Is there a way for render to texture to respect the alpha channel of a texture card. Like for tree leaves, Ivy, etc. I have followed Ben Clowards tutorial on setting up a scene where you can render a normal map from within your scene using a basic camera or orthographic view and the default scanline renderer http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps11.shtml. I would prefer not to use this method to rend. My diffuse, and normal passes because If you move the camera at all you’re render passes don’t coincide, and also you have to manually crop your texture in photoshop. So render to texture can it respect alpha?

Ben Apuna

I use a completely different workflow for foliage because I had so much trouble getting alpha card leaves to work the way you are trying to do it.

The way I ended up making foliage was to model and texture high poly geometry, then bake that down to the foliage plane(s). No need for cameras or any other trickery that way. This way you get normal, AO, perfect alpha, diffuse, and any other type of map you might want with a simple render to texture.

knak47

OK, I am familiar with that route, and it does produce good results. I might go that direction. I have figured out most of it today though. The only thing I haven't grasped now is step 6

6. Set up a scene using light tracer in the same way you would if you were doing RTT for ambocc.

cuz when i throw a skylight in there and throw a white material on my objects they don't come out like they do when you render to texture. they just come out white.