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===[TASK]=== Trees


LordGood
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2 hours ago, LordGood said:

what a surprise deciduous trees are even more difficult.

It's difficult to find the right placement for the planes and getting the right textures.

A trick I found to make trees seem more natural its placing the planes in an upward angle with a bend. Took forever to figure this out :brickwall:

Spoiler

77974302_treeexample.thumb.png.758a3ef6b6a3afb8e4b2c5211529c32f.pngscreenshot0087.thumb.png.ce82b0716285fece8fe6f6aa19d0f270.png

 

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2 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

The planes should mostly be at a 45 degree-ish angle. 

Whew imagine if it were this simple, that would be lovely

 

4 hours ago, Bigtiger said:

A trick I found to make trees seem more natural its placing the planes in an upward angle with a bend. Took forever to figure this out :brickwall:

I think you got such good results here because the tree's actual growth patterns do complement that branch structure, here they have more of a droop down which leaves some flattening around the crown. My textures a bit on the opaque side so the consequence of flat geometry is a bit more extreme than with my previous evergreens, and also makes those upward angles look horrific lol

definitely more work to be done, but it's a start

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4 hours ago, dmzerocold said:

@LordGood could you please let me know where can i find blender files of this artworks?

AFAIK no blend files were committed.

5 hours ago, Loki1950 said:

BTW there is a blender plug in for generating trees much more polys than we require though.

Enjoy the Choice :)

Which means you have to do cleaning work to stay under 800 polys. Might be worth it.

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9 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Random angles look messy. The 45 degree angles of, say, the carobs, give ther best illusion of fullness, while angling the planes directly at the standard camera view.

That's how you get all the trees to look the same, poly structure needs to follow the branch structure. Only one side of these 45 degree branches are going to be facing the camera, the others will look horribly stretched, since they will be facing edgewise towards the camera. Curved branch structures have fewer harsh edges and breaks, and will complement the rotation of the camera rather than cut against it.

There is plenty of trial and error in this process, if we could have unique trees and keep to the simplicity of 45 degree foliage we'd have done so

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I am quite sure you will vehemently disagree, but I figured it could be said anyway. I think doubling the faces and inverting the normals should be unnecessary. This isn't a FPS, so you really don't need the tree to look good at every possible angle (especially from not below the canopy). You're doubling the triangles and doubling the transparent faces to render. (If you also worry about reflections in water, the water renderer already renders the back face for you, {though something needs done to add a darkness/shadow to this rendering, the reflection is too bright, but that's an aside}).

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10 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I am quite sure you will vehemently disagree, but I figured it could be said anyway. I think doubling the faces and inverting the normals should be unnecessary. This isn't a FPS, so you really don't need the tree to look good at every possible angle (especially from not below the canopy). You're doubling the triangles and doubling the transparent faces to render. (If you also worry about reflections in water, the water renderer already renders the back face for you, {though something needs done to add a darkness/shadow to this rendering, the reflection is too bright, but that's an aside}).

I didn't know the water would render the blackface. Then my only concern would be the cinema manager when rendering cutscenes. But else yes they might be unnecessary.

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On 3/15/2019 at 8:56 PM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I am quite sure you will vehemently disagree, but I figured it could be said anyway.

>:CC

Yeah I would say if at all, be extremely conservative about how many polys go underneath, as long as you can reasonably cover the canopy. not waste more than say 64 tris? I know some of my new ones are a bit excessive. Still havent outshone the cretan date or tropical palms though so thats a plus lol

 

screenshot0071.png

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Also, I will mention that @Enrique used auto-smooth for the canopy faces on his oaks and other "newer" trees. The benefit of this is that those faces don't immediately darken when the sun is rotated in a different direction than standard. He applied this smoothing to the wheat models as well, which helped make their self-shadowing look nicer too and didn't make them blah out when rotated. This also gave a nice pseudo-transparency effect. See the trees in Britannic Road.

 

Awesome baobabs, btw. Should look awesome on the African savanna maps!

screenshot0004.jpg

Edited by wowgetoffyourcellphone
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1 hour ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

@Sundiata, when can we get your awesome new "African" huts and stuff? With Lordgood's baobabs, I'm really looking forward to punching up the savanna maps!

Ah yes, soon! I keep obsessing about the acacia, lol... Modeling trees is hard... I'll be sending more huts and stuff very soon!

At least I just finished the first new Acacia variant, I think... I read something about keeping it under 800 tris, so I kept it at 784 :P ... The other variants will be simpler/smaller and have less tris. This is just the mother acacia.

1148824995_Acaciatesting.thumb.jpg.d00dad7a359b8ad3a180a05d4a80c87f.jpg

 

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