Tree branch textures - what am I doing wrong?
Hello everyone,
I'm currently working on a small indie game, and I'm responsible for the vegetation. So I've been struggling quite some time now with branch textures. I know that they are crucial in making a tree look lush and "un-planey", and the first tree texture I baked from a high poly branch got me quite some nice results.
Here are the links. The first two maps are from the "good looking" branch, which was pretty much baked in a hurry. Sorry for the weird normal map, I haven't got Photoshop on my machine at home, will upload it from work tommorow.
And these are the new one's which look artifical:
To my novice eyes, the new texture should look a lot better on the model, but in-game and on a model always looks so incredibly artificial and badly lit. Flat. I suspect it has something to with the lighting set-up; I tried lighting the high poly branch with a spotlight from above, in order to get a texture as unshaded as possible. Is that even how it's done? Should branch textures be lit at all? If yes, from which direction? Should they have highlights?
Any advice I could get would be greatly appreciated. I looked through most of the threads about foliage here on polycount wiki, but I just couldn't figure out what I'm doing wrong.
Thanks in advance!
Nicolas
I'm currently working on a small indie game, and I'm responsible for the vegetation. So I've been struggling quite some time now with branch textures. I know that they are crucial in making a tree look lush and "un-planey", and the first tree texture I baked from a high poly branch got me quite some nice results.
Here are the links. The first two maps are from the "good looking" branch, which was pretty much baked in a hurry. Sorry for the weird normal map, I haven't got Photoshop on my machine at home, will upload it from work tommorow.
And these are the new one's which look artifical:
To my novice eyes, the new texture should look a lot better on the model, but in-game and on a model always looks so incredibly artificial and badly lit. Flat. I suspect it has something to with the lighting set-up; I tried lighting the high poly branch with a spotlight from above, in order to get a texture as unshaded as possible. Is that even how it's done? Should branch textures be lit at all? If yes, from which direction? Should they have highlights?
Any advice I could get would be greatly appreciated. I looked through most of the threads about foliage here on polycount wiki, but I just couldn't figure out what I'm doing wrong.
Thanks in advance!
Nicolas
Replies
I don't think many people will take the time to download files from dropbox to critique and provide feedback, especially with potential adware and the like.
Clicked link
Saw .dds
Closed window
Don't make it tedious for people to help you. I'm not gonna download your texture and open it in Photoshop. Use jpeg
Here are the links, this time as JPEGs. The first two maps are from the "good looking" branch, which was pretty much baked in a hurry. Sorry for the weird normal map, I haven't got Photoshop on my machine at home, will upload it from work tommorrow.
And these are the new ones which look artificial:
Thanks!
Nicolas
Since the second one has a smaller branch you'd either have a clumpy style of tree, or have to model out some additional smaller branches (this is me not knowing at all how your actual tree model looks btw so I could be way off)
The only other thing that I can think of besides not seeing the models themselves is that there is a very obvious difference in lighting on the second texture in the upper left (appears as if a light source is right next to that spot), which probably wouldn't look the best if the sun in-game is shining in a different direction, or the fact that the billboards are probably facing a bunch of different ways/rotated at different angles to form the tree, so the change in value is noticeably different.
I will get screenshots of the models today, so the difference becomes more obvious.
@Deathstick
I don't think it has that much to do with the branch shape. The lighting might be a problem, just as you mentioned. Just so I understand the general concept: The texture should not have any significant change in value, and no shadows that pop out, right? So If I bake a texture, should I light it with spotlights at all? I found that just a flat diffuse looks bad, but too much lighting looks bad as well. I think there's a general thing about textures I didn't yet understand. :-/
@CubeRepublic
So you would leave more empty spaces between the leaves? I'll try that on the next attempt.
You are trying to make it too clean. In other words, every leaf i see is facing the same direction, there is no rotation in the like there would be in real life.
Branch texture is too clean and small, scale it up.
Bad placement of the leaves, you use the same clusters over and over again and you only re size them. Place some individual leaves here and there and ditch the "5 leaf sircle" thing you have going on.
But any idea why the lighting looks so bad? Why the texture looks so flat? Or is that only due to the placement?
But now that we are moving towards next-gen you should allow yourself to move away from single planes when making the tree. Intersecting planes is a good idea to look into as it will give it much more depth and thickness.
Making lush vegetation doesn't require the texture to have depth, as it's just a flat texture it's not going to have much. Placement of the branches is MUCH more important, as well as the renderer/game engine used to render the tree will have a lot to say.
Some examples i made in CryEngine
If you want reality you have to imitate reality
Here are the examples of the trees as they are rendered in SpeedTree:
The flat one:
Click
And the better one:
Click
And this is the "branch" mesh I use for the textures. I tried adding an additional loop and stretching it around a little, but it didn't feel like it was worth the additional polycount:
Click
If I may ask, how is the topology in your branch model?
Thanks for the advice so far!
Nicolas
And finally, may I ask how you lit your high poly branch when you baked the texture?
Again, thanks a lot for the advice so far. I know some artists are pretty secretive about their knowledge, and I really appreciate you taking the time for helping me.
Of course it's always nice to have the skills to be able to model a tree without speedtree as well. I believe a lot of studios use speedtree, judging by the amount of times the name appears in small font when I start up a game. But then again, there are studios that don't, and there are studios that use both methods (manual, and speedtree). For example, I know Bethesda studios uses speed tree in practically all of their games, where as I remember seeing a thread about the Battlefield 3/4 foliage where the person did most of it by hand.
Just another potential tool to think about as you work.
Actually, we do use SpeedTree. I found out, though, that a "crossover"-workflow from Max and SpeedTree gets better results than the default leaf meshes and texture from ST. So what I usually do is model leaf meshes in max, export them as FBX, and then use SpeedTree to create a branch which I bake texture from. Then I create custom branch meshes for the planes in max and distribute them among a generated tree with SpeedTree.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/swzi1q4vjgx73le/ScotsPineIngame.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rvmkkv84fcxc9ih/ScotsPineBranch.JPG?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jckwvstq5w6amov/ScotsPineBranch_n.JPG?dl=0
Thanks again for all your help, which was really invaluable!