Hey @benkroft , this is looking great! I’m always a sucker for good procedural materials, and I LOVE how much experimenting you’ve done on this so far.
For this project, I actually prefer the approach where each clump of leaves is an image texture (whether that’s baked or painted) for a few reasons. First, to get this to interact well with lighting, we’re going to have to adjust the normals, and that can only be done if the particles are converted to real geometry and all of that geometry is joined together as one object. With the current setup that’s based on the object coordinates, that important step of the workflow completely breaks the texture.
Secondly, I would much prefer to see the silhouette show actual leaf shapes, even if they’re really small, than a generated texture. The procedural texture does look good and I could definitely see it being used in a game, but in the interest of tying all of these assets together to create one unified looking whole, that’s one thing I think we have to stick to. Your WIP #5 seems to be right on the money in terms of direction. You could add some procedural variation to that if you feel it needs it.
Easily full points for this week. Keep up the good work!
