@jlampel ok I did see the images and thought those where what I'd choose. The experimentation was fun tho.
Wow, these look really great! Awesome job @keter ! Full points for this week. For most of the other nature assets we've gone with using transparent planes with bunches of leaves painted or baked on rather than using geometry for each individual leaf for the sake of polycount, but this is reasonably low poly so it could still work. Kent covered that other method in his livestream at about 50 minutes in: https://cgcookie.com/live_streams/collab2021-week-3-casual?wtime=3070
I dug through the file and the only thing I would want to change for this type of setup would be to set the icosphere's shadow method to none so that it doesn't effect the lighting of the leaves.
Keep up the good work!
@jlampel after watching and changing my settings and a few other things after watching Kent's live stream here are my bushes. I'm scared to upload my file to the drive for messing things up.
Thank you @jlampel here's the link to my file
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lQZUoxwFv2P9Rz-14Gjy6CuXqVKKLU_o/view?usp=sharing
These look really good! Wow! Full points for week 3 and a little extra for the effort.
The last step is to make convert each particle system to a separate object. To do so you can click Convert on the particle system in the modifier properties, make each instance a separate object with Object / Relations / Make Single User / Object & Data (needed to apply scale), Ctrl + A to apply scale (necessary so that they don't scale up crazily in the next step), and Ctrl+J to join all the leaf objects into one.
We can then use the Data Transfer modifier to copy the normals from the original blobby bush object to the leaves so that it appears more like a rounded shape than a bunch of planes:
I decimated the original bush so that it's a bit simpler to speed things up a bit, but it should be fine either way. We do want it set to smooth shading though so the leaves will be copying the normals of the smoothed version.
For the shader, a little bit of translucency goes a long way to helping it look soft. We want to use that instead of emission so that it looks good regardless of the lighting:
This process will break the procedural texture setup unfortunately (which looked really good!) since the bush as a whole is now the object instead of each bunch of leaves individually, but you could bake the original leaf object's procedural color to a color map if you'd like to keep it.
Hope that helps and let me know if you have any questions along the way!
@jlampel i will need to research how to bake the colors. Any advice on where to look?
Hopefully this video helps! Intro to Baking Textures with Cycles - CG Cookie
@jlampel @theluthier I've submitted my final. Had someone load it up for me to make sure it went to the right place. SpiceWorld is looking amazing!
PS I looked at the settings, when I I first opened it and put it in Render Mode, everything looked fine but the Alpha was black. I had Blanche look at it, and he didn't see the black.
And here's my final Render.
These are so pleasantly soft looking that i want to touch them! 😍 I love the color and the texture that their appearance brings!
ketre - Karen, when I look at the image above it reminds me of a Claude Monet painting. It has that feel to it - at least for me. Having said that, I have noticed that you have posted a final render today. Say the word, and I will be happy to update your showcased artwork in the blog with your new render. However, because of the aspect ratio of the frame that I am using, the top of the tree will be cutoff, but the bottom will show some grass. I think you did a great job with the lighting that shows off shadowing and the color really pops in the whole scene. Great job.
ketre - Karen, I just posted an update to your showcased artwork (towards the bottom of page 2). As mentioned above, the framing is not the same as your final render. If you like the new posting, let it ride. If you are not satisfied, give me a render that you want to have showcased. Personally, I LIKE IT. But, this is your art.
WOW! Using your bushes to build a tree's leaf volume! That's pretty clever. It turned out great ketre 👏
I'm so glad you were able to contribute to this project. As always it's a pleasure working with you :)