Collab2021 – WIP – benkroft

WIP 1:

I started with a alpha plane and a procedrual texture approach, but i realised it will be really complex shaders to create for a entire bush. Mayby i come back to this idea later, but for single leaves.

Then i decided to chech some of my reference material i gathered on youtube and watched Gibly tees tutorial by lighing boy.

How to Create Ghibli Trees in 3D – Blender Tutorial – YouTube

This style looke really close  and i recreated it.

This hase some limitations or thing to be solved later.

Light dependant. Sunlamp controlls generall direction.

 Uses Ambient occlusion Eevee. This gives a bit better details in the shaddows, can be turned off if needed.

Material (Color) switching dependent on object color value. So we have only 1 instance and 1 material to duplicate.

Add point light to controll lighted areas  better. Negative values for shaddows. Point lamps without shadows for better performance if needed.

Not bad for the first day, i gonna check if i can bake texturemaps for this.

WIP 3:

I tried to reduce the polycount fo my ghibli bush. It already used a decimate modifier, but i cutd reduced i even more to save 80%. Now the geomerty is has 6 verts. Then i have a basic clupp of a bush which i instance a lot in the scene, so technically it dont at more geometry to the scene with instancing, but it slows dawn viewport a bit.

I figourd out i can usea a basemesh with just 6 verts, so no modifiers needed.

I also removed the point lights, wich was a huge perfomance issue. And i try to use  it with only 1 sunlamp.

Did some testing for vertex counts with different modeliing. Hard to achieve low poly wiht details (it looks ok but still high vertex count) . In this example all objects are converted to meshes, no instances, no particle systems. I think instances will save geometry for a small performance drop, so this is my way to go i think.

I think that is possible, i had the same thougt for my bush. i have not a perfect workflow for this but u can use a branch of the sappling tree with leafes, render it out and then u have a single plane with a branch u can then duplicate arround. this is a verry simplified method.

“Homework Submission – Week 1 – FG Bushes “

@theluthier 

A sphere shape with a particle system to distribute 3 alphaplanes, simple handpainted alphamap. This is the lowest poly method i found. Total of 10’000 verts for all 4 bushes. Some shaders i tested relay on geometry / lighting , but i cover that later.

As an alternative this is a ghibly style bush, but it’s a lot of poligons arround 50k -200k at minimum. I’m ok to stick with the alpha planes version.

WIP 5:

I wanna share my progress with baked textures to a simple plane.

Someone mentioned this link in the last stream:

Autumn Tree

I analized it and saw a opportunity to improve my bush, i was already on the right track .

I started with the leaf shape, doing it procedrually. (later i think of modelling it with highres geometry to bake then)

The i created a twig by duplicating the leaf and add a branch. This then can be baked to a plane.

I struggled a bit with the baking proces, also the alpha masks aren’t perfect yet (u can see the original shape of the leaf plane).

I baked from selection to active. Later i want to bake normal and roughness maps too.

Then i added 2 loopcuts to simple deform it a little, to make it look better from different angles. (this can be optimised and removed later for better performance, cutting it from 9  to 4 verts)

The materials setting first loked kinda strange with the alphatransparency. I use blend mode alpha hashed and shadow mode alpha hashed as well. For some reason alpha blend doesent work for this, the leafs ar kinda see through and show faces behind them as well.

First i thought it was a problem with backface showing or backface culling, but its the blend mode itself.

Alpha hashed looks good, and alpha blend has shading problems.

Use shade smoth to get rid of hard edges in lighting reflections.

And here is the WIP for now.

I think the technik works excellent, now its time to do a clean leaf, proper bake and some color variations in the shader and match the referenc better.

The bush is a bit small still, but the vertex count is at 720 verts, really low.

let me know your thoughts on this, happy to share and improve further.