COLLAB2021 - If You Wanna Have Some Fun - NATURE FG

Hey Guys,

   I'm not sure what I've done.  I created this leaf:

It has a fair bit of geometry I'd either have to bake down to planes, or simply create an image of.  I thought it looked pretty nice. . . but when I try to use it I get absolutely no shadows.

I get that both in material preview and rendered view.  If I select solid I at least get:

I'm sure I've done something silly to my leaf, but I'm having trouble figuring out what that is.  When I finally get my GSync syncing I may put the .blend file up to help others look at it; I was just wondering if somebody had run into this before and had a "Oh yeah, you need to do X".

Thanks!

I really like the bark on the tree.  I did some additional sculpting and similar (but hopefully different) texture.  Thoughts?

llangleyjij  I'd sculpt detail on the retopo mesh, using Multires, so I could bake from Multires. The copy of the retopo would be for safety measure, just in case I'd mess up ;)

But you can give the other method a go, for testing (on a simple model) and see how that goes. 

Might give some weird baking results, I don't really know...theoretically it should work, I think...

Could be a Light issue; in Material Preview, the default Environment gives (almost) no shadow:

But you can enable Scene Lights.

In Rendered mode, also make sure you have at least  Scene Lights enabled:

I like it!

It could be, that the effect of the normal map, when baked, will be not very strong, as this tree is so much in shadow 🤔

Update on the foregeround bushes after referencing the stylized bush creation videos that Kent provided for us, in particular trying to provide the "chunky-ness" to the bushes. I switched to alpha planes instead of instanced geo for performance's sake.

However, I'm looking into shading issues when using alpha mapped planes; the render comes out sort of blurry as evidenced in the render above. Additionally, I need to optimize the bushes as they are currently too high poly.

I really love it, nice work on the tree, perhaps at the bottem the texture could be wider then near the top, but awesome job 

Awesome job, great work i love that tree. The wood could use some detail but aside great work 😁

I did clean it up a bit and tried to make it gradually get smaller bark chunks.  I am pleased with how it is turning out.  Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks spikeyxxx.  I gave that a try, but something else was wrong with it.  I'm putting it on hold as really I think I should be focusing on getting the bushy leaves right at this point.

Just ran out of time this week.  Not making nearly as much progress as I need to on aligning the leaves.

notcastanza That is a "hero" tree if I ever saw one. It definitely has the stylized look we're going for.  Fantastic work!

Question, is there a good way to get the inner of the flower and stam to look high poly while still been low poly ?(of the green part of the flower that connects the flower with the leafs and ground)

first i was thinking of painting it like with the most left flower (but when i would want a part to be hanging downwards i wonder how i could get that to lookgood without adding too much geometry)

I'd say, considering the size of the flowers, you can just use those hexagons (six-sided) for the centers and the stems don't need more geometry either, although I think they look a bit thin maybe....

MG and BG Tree (and maybe even Bushes) makers that are struggling with their vertex count:

maybe you could use a few spheres or so to create the main blobby shapes, using a fun shader, maybe even as simple as this:

and only have 'a few' strategically placed leaves (at the contours,mainly...) to suggest that they are full of leaves.

so then technicaly these i had modelled are good just a bit thicker then ?

That's what I think, yes :)

Hi @jlampel My WIP thread does contain my username: https://cgcookie.com/questions/14261-collab2021-wip-artifact