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===[TASK]=== Trees


LordGood
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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..." :lmao:

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

 

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

825385996_Acaciatestscreen1.thumb.jpg.643d0422e4662c68a353497542d7fab5.jpg

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:

954776600_Acaciatestscreen3.thumb.jpg.6b6595891c5f1dc1e46b703f05ab4a2e.jpg

 

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:

1441827760_Acaciatestscreen2.thumb.jpg.7fddfa8a6cc353cb3d4a9a68ddb30a15.jpg

 

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...

Acacia3.png.4f23d0b50eb01d377709ed2d8283db87.png

 

And here's a previous version:

Acacia.png.9cc20eac8423fdedef97855488a59e5f.png

 

Used for this attampt:

1059023707_ScreenShot2019-03-08at22_55_42.thumb.jpg.4d2be7c53eddd0494be2b36d8766282b.jpg

Edited by Sundiata
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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'

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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

89329_1.jpg.8635774eb9310983665459302d2bb7c0.jpgsouthern-shielf-fern.jpg.48755b46863c43ff4050da6c279c27ae.jpg05001_1.jpg.18bd7a62ff6f9fe34d98f793dcde35d8.jpghappy-tassel-fern.jpg.14a0a14a2d16a3e01079b618578fe9f6.jpg87519260_XS.jpg.f3078aad46e650661fb9ab115d9101ab.jpg

 

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? 

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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

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

screenshot0064.png

screenshot0063.png

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

64crop.jpg

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