If i set the exterior band width to 0.02 that seems to do a good enough job keeping the background cards from appearing on the edges
Ill look into that link though
Btw it dose look better with the sticks drawn as you do get some floating leaf balls from time to time
Just thought i would point that out if you wanted to change that
If i wanted to make the highlight cards all face outward from the volume mesh thing
is that doable?
Yup.
Also, the occasional floating ball is the nature of the beast with this thing. It’s easy to edit out later though. You’ll just have to endure it until you’re ready to export.
Just draw the sticks and it connect to them is what i mean, but yer
the align thing it too complex for me to understand yet, unless he straight out shows me how to do it with the nodes i have he might aswell be talking quantum physics lol
I need to dedicate more time to learning the basics
Well theres some things to figure out with card facing(i might wait to try out the biillboard shader later on)
Bit this is really really awesome, hopefly the shadow thing can be fixed as it looks like i need it for the blue shading for the under canopy
Im going to do more visual tests tomorrow with my texture atlas
Edit:Changed all the leaf cards to 3 planes and i also added in the other two leaf cards smudge 2 and 3
I think it helps add more variety, but its going to be a style choose thing i guess
Heres before
@Renzatic Im guessing this issue is due the the shadow thing, these are the highlight cards going all dark which dosnt happen on the source blend, just pointing it out incase it was missed
Great stuff! I made a few copies to see what a forest would look like, connected your 4 “seed” parameters to the group input so I could add variation to trees without changing the GN setup. To make smaller trees I scaled the points of the trunk curve. Or is that a node group parameter I missed? Will you be releasing this as a product, either a single tree or a pack of trees with materials included? This style is great for NPR scenes.
I could eventually bundle it with a set of trees at some point, but I’ll probably never offer it up for sale. I’ve taken so many bits and pieces from so many people, I don’t feel like it’s enough of my own to justify asking money for it.
That’s probably because I’m using smaller, more densely packed spheres to draw normal information from. Those highlight leaves might just happen to fall into a split between two spheres, and they’re getting shadowed.
Try to play around with the color ramp attached to the Dot Product node. That’ll tighten up the space used to distribute the highlight nodes, and might get rid of some problematic cards.
…though I think it looks pretty alright personally. You want a little bit of random splashes of light and shadow in there.
edit: Alternately, you could just remove the darker colors from the shader. If you want it to JUST be highlights, then just give it no choice but to highlight.
You could put it on gumroad for 0 under the pay what you want, so people and pay you something if they want. You can have credits and links to all the people you have borrowed things from.
Your GN trees are very good but not alot of people will find it as easily so just having on gumroad would be good and theres the chance you might get something in return as you have still put in alot of work on this and that is certainly worth something!!
Before I’d do that though, I’d want to get it into a “100% I’m happy with it” state, which right now, it isn’t.
Though I did drop a line to that tree generator guy on Artstation. He said he’d help me out with some things here and there, so now I’m asking him questions.
I found changing the ramp just removed the highlight cards which isnt what i want
The highlight cards are intended to be on the shadowed area to as lighter blue colors
If you look at the stylesheet you can see top left in the red circles, the highlight cards should have the same gradient as the base leaves just the ramp is all in a lighter tone overall to make them stand out from the base leaves all over the tree but the middle sections would be alot more subtle and standout alot less
If i remove the link to selection of the distribute points on faces node for the highlights i still have the dark highlights. I believe this is all due to not having that top to bottom(directional) shadow, i think it helps the highlights be more dark on the darker side of the tree more then on a per sphere basis.
The shadow thing is meant to make the primary shadows be on the whole tree as if it was one object like this then the shadows from the spheres is used as additional noise.
have you had any luck with the shadows, do you know what the issue is?
Ah sweet hope he can help with the features you wanted like the shape thing that would be super cool to have for making hedges with interesting shapes
Go into the Shader editor, select the foliagecard_ramp_highlight material, find the color ramp with the various shading colors on it, and delete the dark blue color. You’ll get results that look like this.
Then watch this video to get a good idea of what it’s doing. This particular shader isn’t actually getting lighting information from the lamps, but the underlying principle is roughly the same.
Why don’t you set up a donation account so that users can contribute to the project? If you feel guilty about it, 30% can go to keeping you alive and caffeinated so you can continue updating the project, and the other 70% can go to a charity that plants trees. Save physical trees by making digital trees!
There’s a difference between asking for money and accepting donations from those who don’t have the time or skills to contribute to the project itself.
I could do that. I’ll call it the Poor Renzatic Fund, and say that the vast majority of the donations will go towards keeping my stocks of beer and videogames up.
…some small percentage of your donations might go towards something worthwhile. Though I won’t say how much, cuz, you know, it also might not. Not unless you consider me the ultimate worthwhile charity, which I sure as hell do!
As i say i am after the the blue color of highlights on the darker side
Here the ramp im using with that guys setup, i have the highlights both in the light and dark sides.
And yes i know its not actually light directed and thats what the direction empty is for.
But you can see in that guys version you dont get the dark highlights where there not meant to be and im guessing is the shadow setup that your setup is missing atm as thats the main difference between his and your right now
Im not pointing it out to moan, just general talk about it and pointing out what i see ect.
Mostly just trying to be as clear as i can be with what i mean
Don’t fret it. I’m working on it now.
Had to buy shrimp first though.
edit: You know, it’s really disappointing how you can’t copy/paste geo nodes between Blender instances.
Yeah, I still try to do that then go, ahhh, nope!
Whats makebuyshrimp?
Yer having to append things is annoying
So i been messing around and i think i got part of the shadow working
Before
Only the top part, the bit i highlighted i think is working
the bottom part is meant to be a shadow from the center of the foliage outward to add depth
Im guessing you have got this far or as all i did was copy it over and plug in the geometry from the leaf axis to the scale instances node. I was just messing around for the sake of it, mostly just because.
I dont really know what im doing lol
