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  • Kent Trammell Jonathan Lampel Wayne Dixon Paul Caggegi
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    Collab2021-WIP-notcastanza

    Collaborations
    Ben Reichel(notcastanza)

    Collaboration 2021 workspace

    Reply
    • Ben Reichel(notcastanza) replied

      @jlampel  spikeyxxx 

      Well ... I tried something new.  I tried painting with a stencil.  I created a basic wood stencil in PS.  It was a bit tricky trying not to overlap strokes, but I think I did okay for my first time.  That's what these Colabs are for, right?  :)  

      I tried to make the grain flow up the tree better.

      Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have more time before Sunday to work on it.  However, I feel like I did a pretty good job keeping it low-poly even though it is a foreground asset.  Without the leaf particles it is under 7k faces.

      Thanks for all the feedback and encouragement!  You guys are great and the cookie community is wonderful!

      Full Tree

       Closeup Top

      Closeup Bottom

    • Jonathan Lampel replied

      Nice job notcastanza , full points for week 4! Props for re-painting the texture several times and trying something new each time. I'd be happy to give more feedback if you want to continue refining this, but no worries if not and I can consider this final if everything is properly submitted to the google drive. 

    • Kent Trammell replied

      notcastanza Great job with you tree! The way you tested style is very commendable in a project like this.

      It looks like your latest bark texture isn't on Google Drive..which is OK because I actually like the previous iteration a bit better. Both are interesting and a little on the strong side in that they stick out visually compared to other trees.

      I tweaked the asset in a few ways to make it integrate more cleanly into the assembly:

      1.  Replaced your branch geo with a card. Cards are far less goemetry than modeled leaves and alpha-mapped cards are calculated much faster by Eevee.

      2.  Diminished the bark texture. While I like the bark design, it needs to be downplayed to not stick out like a sore thumb among the rest of the trees. I mixed it with a simple gradient texture to achieve this.

      3.  Introduce a slightly emissive gradient to the leaf volume. I converted your leaf particle system to real geometry to apply a spherical gradient to the whole mass (as I've been regularly doing to the majority of vegetation throughout the scene. This gives the whole volume of leaves a consistent coloration as the trees in the art show.


      In the end it looks great in the assembly!

      Thanks for joining the Collab! I hope you enjoyed and learned from the experience. It was a pleasure working with you 🤝



    • Ben Reichel(notcastanza) replied

      @theluthier  @jlampel  

      Thanks for the feedback.  I'm sorry you had to do so much work just to make my tree fit the style.  I feel like I deviated from the design aesthetic too much.  I definitely got carried away with the texturing but this is the first time I baked textures from highres to lowres and it actually worked.  Combine that with my first time I actually understood texture painting and I was doomed.  In a good way.  :)    I am going to keep using this asset for practicing both texturing and UV unwrapping.   I made a few changes to the unwrapping that Johnathan suggested and that helped with my later texturing, a lot.

       Even though I jumped the rails, I am thankful for the encouragement and feedback.