Collab2021 – WIP – benkroft

[Tobias Schmid]

“Homework Submission – Week 2 – FG Bushes “

@theluthier 

I canceled the bake idea with real geometry and tried the procedrual approach.

The texture looks really nice. I still need to find a good way to interaction with light.

I still need to upload it to google drive, working on it.

[Jonathan Lampel]

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!

[Tobias Schmid]

WIP 7: 

Hi @jlampel 

I worked a on real geometry. Is this the right way or did you mean that i can bake the twig / branch to a single plane to save geometry.

Because this is about 80’000 verts, will that be ok? 

Can we use a bit of procedrual shaders in the final result like the nodes below to get color variation? 

In terms of style i’m close i think, i probably will delete the high frequency details in the texture.

I have the branches invisible right now. I will handplace some on the final model, they dont need to be distributed everywhere.

[Jonathan Lampel]

Nice! 

I was thinking baking the groups of leaves and small branches to a single plane to save on geometry. You could also paint on that texture to give the leaves some subtle veins and gradients so they don’t look quite so simple, sort of like you did here with procedural textures:

[Tobias Schmid]

WIP 8:

I modeled a branch with individual leaves, then baked all maps to textures. Alpha mask was a bit tricky at the edges,  but i found a way to get it. Finally appended as particles. Some procedrual color variation. 

This is without lighting information but thanks to normalmaps it will work fine. Maybe i add some translucency.

[Tobias Schmid]

“Homework Submission – Week 2 – FG Bushes “ 

@jlampel 

Happy to finish this week. It was great.

For next week i try to emphasise the clumps more with color gradinents or so. And the overall silhouette can be improved.

Anything else to keep an eye on?

[Jonathan Lampel]

These are looking great! Exactly what we’re looking for. In addition to what you already mentioned, I would love to see some more really subtle variation in the leaf color in the texture, and the normals copied from spheres via the Data Transfer modifier so that the light makes them look more rounded. On a technical note, I also think we should go with Alpha Clip for the leaves to improve performance. Keep up the good work!

[Tobias Schmid]

“Homework Submission – Week 4 – FG Bushes ” 

Final Model

@jlampel @theluthier 

I finished my polishing and saved the Master version. I have 3 collections, each with a individual bush.

I have tried 1 material, with a color switch with the vertex colors, to change from green to orange. But then i decided its simpler and easier with 2 materials.

Waiting for all the implementations. Was a fun and good learning excercise. Any final thoughts from your side?

[splat21]

@benkroft, your bushes look fantastic!  Great work.

[Jonathan Lampel]

This looks amazing – I don’t have any further comments. Killer job here and I can’t wait to see these in the final scene! 

[wolf.gang]

Been following this one silently from the start, really awesome to see what you managed to achieve for the final result!

[Tobias Schmid]

thanks, your barrel is on the way to be awesome as well. nice texture and sculpting.

[Kent Trammell]

@benkroft I must second the remarks from Lampel and Wolgang: Stellar job with your bushes! Just…beautiful 👏

Your WIP thread is also a wonderful progression, full of interesting and useful nuggets. Thanks so much for joining the Collab. It’s been a pleasure working with you 🤝

[Author]

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