Reply To: Collab2021-WIP-ullreym
Homework Submission – Week 3 – FG Tree B
@theluthier and @jlampel
Assets: Nature E: FG Tree B My Work in Progress
- I finally was able to produce the two maps from the high-resolution geo. Yay!
- I learned why to create the UV map first in a project like this.
- The UV map shows some unused texel density real estate. That is for the vegetation and occupants of Tree B.
Long story: I had to do some time traveling this week. 🤨 After the week 2 live stream I was so eager to start the sculpting process I skipped a vital step in the production of the Dirty Vertex Map. Yes, the UV map is a necessary step in the process. I had to go back through my saved revisions of Tree B and collect the pre-applied Mulitres high-res model and go back and try to find the base model that had a matching vertex count. I could not, unfortunately.
To produce the Normal Map I needed the UVs on the lo-res model, but I made those after I had decimated the base model the high-res was based on. Because the high-res model didn’t need its own UVs for the baking process, all was well.
To produce the Dirty Vertex Map all was not well. The high-res detail needed to carry with it the UVs so the baking process could know where to put the images. Ugh! No UVs on the high-res model. I could not copy the UVs because the decimated lo-res tree and the Base model of the Multires tree had mismatched vertex counts.
Short story: I had to recut the UVs of my base model, duplicate and up-res it, append a high-res tree, and use a shrinkwrap modifier to capture my lost high-res detail. The blend file swelled to over 11GB with the different duplicated high-res trees in it. My computer crawled for many hours and took long breaks while trying to accomplish what I was demanding of it.
Leaves: I had made an attempt to use instanced collections as particles, but I was making instanced collections of collections and it didn’t work for me. I had to join the collection as one object and that made the difference. I used the color swatch for the texture painting process. I used the three colors provided and added variety with blending modes with the paintbrush. I made a top and bottom part of the leaf as well as a blossom. This is loosely based on the Magnolia tree in my front yard.
Arboreal Dwellers: I thought that if there was time I could add some squirrels to the tree just out of view of the render camera. The texture painting part was so fun. I enjoyed using the smudge tool to blend the furry effect. I created a simple rig for the creatures and posed them as best as I could with just forward kinematics.
