===[TASK]=== Trees

[Stan`]

@Trinketos I think the main problem here is the way you put the leaf planes :/

[Trinketos]

6 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

@Trinketos I think the main problem here is the way you put the leaf planes :/

Yes, I do not know how to do it well
any advice?

[Stan`]

5 minutes ago, Trinketos said:

Yes, I do not know how to do it well
any advice?

Have you looked at Enrique's tutorial ?

[Trinketos]

1 minute ago, stanislas69 said:

Have you looked at Enrique's tutorial ?

nop

[Stan`]

 

[LordGood]

atlas cedars and cedars of lebanon can be the same thing because they look like the same thing

[LordGood]

I captured the whole awful process

 

[Sundiata]

23 hours ago, LordGood said:

I captured the whole awful process

There's a couple of pretty memorable quotes in there, like:

"Tadaaa, there it is, now you can go home"

"I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but if you wing it hard enough, you can do anything"

"This is truly an awful program"

"Yo, this is where we get whack!"

"Is that detailed enough for ya Stan?"

"I've got to piss like a Russian race horse"

"If you wanted a tutorial, you should have asked for a tutorial. Please don't ask for a tutorial..." 

That last one killed me, because I did actually ask for a tutorial, and you definitely delivered a tutorial... Of sorts...  Thanks man! 

 

Anyway, I'm trying... Not quite succeeding, but trying nonetheless... Acacia attempt 3...

In Dutch, we would say: "Schoon van ver, maar verre van schoon", which roughly translates into "pretty from afar, but far from pretty"...

I have two main problems I see, which is that the geometry of the branches sucks from up close. They're just bent plains (2 bends). And the tris count is getting too high 700 tris, and none of the faces have been doubled with flipped normals to counteract the backface culling, which would increase the tris count to 1200...

By the way, why can't backface culling be disabled for trees? Because doubling the branches/leaves to counteract it, essentially doubles the geometry for trees, doesn't it? Is rendering two faces of a single polygon really more "expensive" than rendering 2 separate one sided polygons?  

Anyway, close up of the ugly:

 

One thing I did like about my attempt, is the detail in the acacia specific texture (512x512). Which is why I decided to post anyway:

 

I'll probably get back to my flora modeling attempts at some time in the future, but for now, if anyone more skilled than me feels compelled to give the acacia a go, here's the CC0 texture I made using wikimedia CC0 images. It was pretty tedious to manually separate the leaves, but with a few adjustments, it would look pretty good, I think...

 

And here's a previous version:

 

Used for this attampt:

Edited March 9, 2019 by Sundiata

[LordGood]

I wasnt quite sure anyone would actually sit through all that haha

I'm sure you saw me run that texture through several contrast filters and back, and there was always a slight gradient from the base of the branch to the leaves.

Is there reasoning here? maybe. Sometimes it looks good, but I think really what it does is pull away from the blatant polygon conservation.

Another good trick is to make a branch texture that starts at the trunk texture's color and value (for dead branches especially) so you can cheat polys into the model by being able to add several small branches at the cost of about 2 tris

I gotta say though, that's some good wingin'

[LordGood]

I'm hoping to give the atlas ranges some love, but I'm finding our rock collection to be lacking quite severely

[Stan`]

Well you can find a few rocks in my eyecandy mod m8te  https://github.com/0ADMods/eyecandy

[Stan`]

3 hours ago, Sundiata said:

"Is that detailed enough for ya Stan?"

I am so sorry

[Sundiata]

Does 0AD have ferns? Probably yes... Thought I'd practice on something a little more simple.

Anyway, 100 tris exactly:

 

DAE file:

Fern 1.dae 

 

 

Original texture source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fern-leaf-oliv.jpg

 

[LordGood]

ah, yes we do have ferns. I have a feeling you're wildly overestimating the required foliage density. My cattails have a grand total of 16 tris

[Sundiata]

19 minutes ago, LordGood said:

I have a feeling you're wildly overestimating the required foliage density.

I was going for the denser types of ferns, like the ones I'm used to from the forests in Belgium (especially in the Ardennes), kind of like these:

Spoiler

 

But yeah, as you see, I'm having trouble keeping even simple stuff low poly... I hate it when something only looks good from a specific angle. 

Without the doubled geometry to counteract backface culling it would be 50 tris. Still too high? 

[LordGood]

the problem with high density is that it'll look a bit like a green smear from the average camera distance. You don't need so many polys  to look good from most angles. I was running around Fallout 4 having a looksie at the environments and most of their ground foliage and saplings looked to be anywhere between 16-48 triangles, which was interesting to me because some of the examples I found were much bigger than my player model, and that's a AAA fps rpg.

Their trees were also remarkably sparse and still looked decent, but that's to be expected post-apocalypse environment i guess lol

[Sundiata]

So much to learn, I have...

[nani]

0 AD textures also suffer alot from the lack of anisotropic filtering, lots of detail gets blurred.

[LordGood]

example being these cattails and trees from FO4

Spoiler

 

[LordGood]

I've also decided we need new baobabs, they're really amazing looking trees irl but they're pretty much indistinguishable from the rest at the moment, a real shame if you ask me

[LordGood]

the 2 saplings on the left have 64 tris, and the one on the right has 120

Here's the one on the far left, some creative manipulation of the mesh helps prevent stretches or breaks in the textures near the ground plane, where they'll likely be most apparent

[LordGood]

I wanna see some killer cedar forests, lads

[LordGood]

alright imma stop with the cedaring

They're in

[WhiteTreePaladin]

We really need a "paint entity" brush feature in atlas for trees.

Edited March 11, 2019 by WhiteTreePaladin

[Sundiata]

Fern attempt 2:

32 tris  

 

Size:

 

.dae file: fern 2.dae

 

Adjusted texture