COLLAB2021 – If You Wanna Have Some Fun – NATURE FG

[Austin Dunham]

@artifact – I agree with Yukino, the first one looks quite a bit better.  Fluffier and @artifact beautiful.  The second one looks good, and there are some places where the shadows stick out more, but it looks a lot more jaggy than the first.

[artifact]

Thanks @wardred  I felt the same. The reason I’m still looking into the alpha planes option is that it may possibly offer better performance given that the goal for the final environment is to run it in real time. But for this week’s submission, I’m going with the leaf geometry option.

[Austin Dunham]

@artifact I don’t know how much geometry you’re going to save.  A simple hexagonal leave is only 6 verts, 8 if you have a couple running down the middle.

A square with a cross running down the middle is 9 verts.

It gets a little dicier if you’re going for more complicated leaves, like maples, or adding depth to the leaf or the stem.

[artifact]

@wardred I agree. The bushes themselves, even with modeled leaves, are unlikely to cause too much of a problem with performance. Still, given the real-time aim of the project, I feel it necessary to explore every option I can get to make the asset as performant as possible in Eevee.

[artifact]

This is what I’ve ended up with. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the look and feel of the bushes at this block out stage. 

And quick rendered with basic materials:

[Austin Dunham]

@danitufi Great work on the FG tree.

The leaves. . . it looks like your clumps are a single image with transparency.  That’s a cool approach.  Mostly I’ve been messing around with individual leaves, and that creates. . . an abundance of vertexes.

[Dani Tufeld]

I realy love the bushes!!

 I think it will look great on trees as well, how optimzed is it?

would you mind sharing the proccess?

[artifact]

Thanks @danitufi 

No, I don’t mind sharing the process at all. I tried to optimize the base geometry I used to distribute the leaves as much as possible, and I managed to get that down to 170 faces.

To get the rough shape of the bushes, I started with metaballs. Once I had the shape I liked, I used the Remesh modifier to get an all quad mesh with roughly even quads. Next I decimated it with the Decimate modifier to lower the polygon count while retaining the overall shape and form. Then to get that to an even lower vertex count, I made a quick retopology manually using a combination of vertex snapping and the shrinkwrap modifier.

[artifact]

The leaf/twig model too is quite simple. I just needed a “good enough” leaf profile for this block-out.

It looks like this from top-view:

Then all that was left to do was use a very basic GN node setup to distribute the leaves over the base geometry:

[Dani Tufeld]

Thanks, I will defently give it a try!!!

[artifact]

Your welcome, mate!

[Matthew Ullrey]

Geometry Nodes sound great, I will need to experiment with this technique. I will upload the offending .blend file for you to play with. It is a strange thing, but I found adding the particle system while still in edit mode had better results.

[Damian Czujkowski]

I’m using same method for my MG bushes, just instead of modelling leaves I use transparent PNG , with green dots and round cube for the base. Today Ill try Your way @artifact. and Ill model some leaves 🙂 This join geometry node at the end is not necessary. Good job with Bushes, I like how they look:)

[Matthew Ullrey]

Thanks, @spikeyxxx I will send over the link to the file. It is a strange phenomenon to be sure. I think I have a workaround for the issue and was able to grow leaves on the branches finally.

https://we.tl/t-hjoB7oJwu8

[artifact]

Thanks @dyoc ! Seems I forgot to remove that join geometry node I got the leaf distribution I liked. My bad!

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