The Branches of Life

I feel terrible that I haven't uploaded any of my progress on the latest 3D project - the foliage project. The brief involved making two trees, and I tried slightly different techniques for both.

For the first tree I used quite a lot of polygons on creating the trunk and branches, meaning that when it came to adding the leaves I couldn't use as many alpha planes as I may have wanted. However, in terms of the diffuse texture of the canopy, I used a photograph of a single leaf and created my own texture sheet with it, meaning the planes themselves are of high quality.

For the second tree I used a minimal amount of polys on the trunk and branches allowing myself more freedom with creating the canopy. I loved the colours in this tree, and the leaves worked out quite well considering they were taken from a photograph with a bright sky. I think many people found difficulty obtaining decent texture photographs due to the branches and leaves appearing very dark in contrast with the white sky (since all of the light is above it).

Unfortunately since I have not documented my progress it is difficult to explain the stages I worked through to the finished models, however I did make notes on problems I encountered, particularly nearing the end.

• alpha textures had white lines/marks around the edges of the planes suggesting a fault with the psd file, however editing would not remove them
• adding specular maps caused the alpha to stop working - I solved this by making the specular map black in the areas the alpha is black
• I'm not fully satisfied with the shapes of either tree - they tend to be a little flat on side views so perhaps I should have used more reference photos
• seams on the branches and trunk are visible - I've now placed them in areas where they are less likely to be seen, but they are still there
• while making LODs for each tree, feathering occured and the poor quality of the render meant the alpha was harder to make
• on 'realistic' in the viewport some of the leaves have very dark shadows that look odd

All in all I am happy with how I have come on with this project, though since the project itself was quicker and easier than previous ones perhaps I should have pushed myself further and tried out new things.

988 tris, 1.44mb texture

912 tris, 1.44mb texture