3DMotive - Creating Foliage For UDK
polycounter lvl 12
Hi everyone
I know that some of you don't look at the news section here, so I thought I should let you know that a new tutorial video, that guys at 3dmotive and me have been working on, has just been released.
The tutorial is about four hours long and focuses mainly on creating foliage textures from highpoly meshes, modelling lowpoly foliage in 3DS Max and setting up materials in UDK to achieve correcting shading and subtle wind movement.
Here's the link to the news story at 3dMotive:
http://www.3dmotive.com/new-release-creating-foliage-for-udk/
and here's the link to the actual video:
http://www.3dmotive.com/training/3ds-max/creating-foliage-for-udk/
Here's the result you can expect:
I hope that you will find it useful guys
Feel free to ask me questions. I will try to answer them the best I can.
I know that some of you don't look at the news section here, so I thought I should let you know that a new tutorial video, that guys at 3dmotive and me have been working on, has just been released.
The tutorial is about four hours long and focuses mainly on creating foliage textures from highpoly meshes, modelling lowpoly foliage in 3DS Max and setting up materials in UDK to achieve correcting shading and subtle wind movement.
Here's the link to the news story at 3dMotive:
http://www.3dmotive.com/new-release-creating-foliage-for-udk/
and here's the link to the actual video:
http://www.3dmotive.com/training/3ds-max/creating-foliage-for-udk/
Here's the result you can expect:
I hope that you will find it useful guys
Feel free to ask me questions. I will try to answer them the best I can.
Replies
Thanks, and keep up!
Any hint on next month's lessons?
Speaking of buying individual videos and nex month's lesson, I'm afraid I don't really know much about it. Tyler (gamedev) and Don (Ott) might be able to tell you more about it.
The last couple of sections in the tutorial are about as UDK specific as you can get without breaking a femur, unless the game engine SPECIFICALLY support the same basic systems and application for stuff like wind, friction, etc, chances are, you need to learn another engine.
As for the video itself, it's pretty bloody good, especially the Max part, it teaches real men how to model their own foliage without reliance on Speed Tree.
However, for the love of all that is holy or earthly, can you guys make a proper introduction video? Something akin to what eat3D does which gives us glimpses, visually, on where things would be taken. I was expecting the video to only teach me modeling, weighted normals and a simple import, but it gave me more, which simply wasn't obvious.
Cheers.
I raise 5 pennies, and play my card:
To answer some of your questions:
The things discussed in the tutorial should be applicable to a majority of engines. Chapters 2-17, as Ace mentions, focus primarily on Max. Some of the engines might use different solution for creating wind movement, or might not support edited normals, but the core modelling part should be universal.
Doing the things I discuss in UDK chapters might be a bit tricky, however I believe it should be possible to create similar materials if the engine you use features a visual material editor, similar to the one in UDK. As far as I'm aware, Unity has something like this (correct me if I'm wrong). CryEngine 3 on the other hand, has built in shaders for foliage, so it shouldn't be necessary to go past tweaking the vert normals to get a nice looking foliage.
There are however, some things in those chapters that should be relevant even to the folks who don't use UDK, like matching your grass texture to the ground, adjusting the foliage textures, or controlling the brightness of the shaded areas.
And a movie of the thing in action so you can see the wind and such. A little low res but, eh ...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/161473/Polycount/Misc/Foliage_Tutorial.wmv
Thanks again! I had a lot of fun...
WarrenMarschall:
Looks like a solid start
The 3Ds Max part is still applicable. As for materials, the only part that may not be relevant is correcting the 2D-sided shading via custom lighting, since that was specific to UDK. Setting up a master material and a wind shader should still be fairly similar. There will be of course differences in how you should setup your specular/gloss networks and balance diffuse textures, but that's to be expected given that UE4 relies on PBR.
Overall if you'd like to apply this tutorial to UE4 (or any other renderer using PBR) I would follow these steps:
1. Reduce contrast and saturation of diffuse textures. If possible match diffuse values to some of the PBR charts floating around.
2. Lower the intensity of your AO layers and keep any prebaked lighting information in your textures to minimum.
3. Create proper spec/gloss maps for your branch textures and vary the values for each leaf.
4. Make the normals of your branch textures strong; make sure that leaves point in different directions.
5. Add an SSS map and subsurface scattering.
Overall with a PBR renderer you want to rely less on details on your diffuse and more on spec/gloss/fresnel/normals and sss.
I have been wanting to buy this for awhile so I guess I am gona give it a go thanks! ^_^