Need help with trees!
polycounter lvl 9
Hi PC, I really need your help right now.
I´ve been practicing making trees the last week, but I feel stuck and I would love some advice or tips/tutorials on this subject. I want to get better at making trees and foliage for modern day games. I´ve tried several textures and tree-types, the one I´m showing right now is a birch, and the branch is pretty much just ripped of of CGTextures.
So please, any help, on making branches, tris-count, workflow etc., is much appreciated.
Tree in Maya, currently 820 tris:
Single branch alpha:
Tree in UDK:
And texture, 1024x512:
I´ve been practicing making trees the last week, but I feel stuck and I would love some advice or tips/tutorials on this subject. I want to get better at making trees and foliage for modern day games. I´ve tried several textures and tree-types, the one I´m showing right now is a birch, and the branch is pretty much just ripped of of CGTextures.
So please, any help, on making branches, tris-count, workflow etc., is much appreciated.
Tree in Maya, currently 820 tris:
Single branch alpha:
Tree in UDK:
And texture, 1024x512:
Replies
As well as that get a cleaner alpha on the leaves, at the moment they look like a bit of a blob.
I agree with the comment above too, you need to be cleaner with your alphas. Look at your reference images (You do have reference right?) and have a look at not only the way the leaves fall, but their size and also the negative space around them. You will find that actually when looking at trees there are quite a lot of gaps and these are just as important as the leaves themselves.
Your texture scaling looks way off too, both the leaves and the bark texture look too big, make sure that you pay attention to reference and take note of the scaling and size of various bits and bobs.
You don't seem to have many branches (other than the main trunk bits). Have a look at this tutorial : http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1021264 - itmakes a lot of sense and gives great results.
While I'm in the Wiki, here is the Normal Thief tutorial I mentioned before: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1149155#post1149155
Good luck, keep going!
But anyway, tons of thanks, that´s exactly the start I need!
Got to agree with the others, I think you need more space between the leaves, more branches. Keep going!
Nope, that won't make any difference. What you could to, wich is the same as normal thief, is to copy the normals from a sphere or something with nice normals you shape after the bigger forms of your leafs and branches. To copy the normals use the transfer attributes in maya.
I had a real hard time creating trees a while back to, i can't say that i'm super at it now neither but some things that i have picked up along the way is; as stated above - think about gravity, even more important - think about the sun, in UDK make use of the transmission mask in the UDK shader, try create a interesting silhouette from all angles.
Have a look at the trees in BF3, allot of the smaller ones actually have there branches going straight up. I think there very lowpoly to for that matter.
Btw, don't be afraid to add poly branches to create a good volume
I´ve been slacking off a bit the last week, but here is my update on the tree, worked on with the advices I got from you people!
*First, ignore the trunk texture, it´s getting re-done
*The left tree is with a lot of branches, numbering 412 tris, and using only Average Normals on the branches.
*The right one I transfered attributes from a normal sphere, as instructed by sltrOlsson, if I got the instructions correct. It´s 592 tris, I added a little tris to the branches to make them bend a little.
Personally I don´t believe I see that much difference between the two techniques.
I do need to work more on the branch texture, it always gets very pixelated and I´m not very good at keeping a good texel density.
Thanks again for the help people, more critic is welcomed!
As i said before, don't be afraid to add poly branches from the tree to scale the volume.
You still have some obvious flat areas on your tree, have a look at the thread (the forum needs a login, sorry guys) take a look at what i did with my leaf polys to avoid the flatness.
Regarding the texeldensity. Just try to keep the texture scales roughly the same. Let's say you have a 512 for the branches and a 512 for the bark, you should let the bark texture tile in hight lke 3-5 times.
You can even take this a step further by adding a gradient to the background image scaling from brighter green at the top to a darker color at the bottom.
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentFoliage
http://wiki.polycount.com/VertexNormal#Foliage_Shading
Leaf density makes a big difference...
http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=TreeCreator_Tutorial#Optimizing_the_leave_texture