I am trying to model bitter gourd, and I have to show many of them in a field fruiting, so I need to have this in low-poly. But how do I achieve this? I tried baking texture after sculpting but it is not creating satisfactory results. And I tried texturing which also doesn’t look that believable. The right one is sculpted.
And this is with custom texture:
What am I doing wrong? How do I make a believable Bitter Gourd fruit?
I am using EVEE (but for baking I used cycles)
Bake the right mesh normal to the left.
The shapes of the low-polygon and high-polygon models must be in the approximation (volume area).
You might try a sphere, deform it properly, select ever secsond vertex in every second “ring” and scale it along Z to get a proper silhouette. Like so (?.. very low poly ):
The amount of vertices is your chouse to go for. Maybe also using every third or forth vertex with proportionla editing witha more “round” selection profile aslo works better for your usecase.
the above suggestions are good, I’ll also suggest leveraging instancing to save performance, and using a high poly one for the up close fruit in your shot, and lower polys for the distant ones. Depending on how dynamic your camera is, you can even render an image of your high poly with transparency and the same lighting conditions and just use it as a single quad image.
@NiklasWerth Did you see the first image? That green gourd is what I got after baking the normals. This method doesn’t work. As The field can be rotated and zoomed in and out so cannot use low poly models for the far ones.
This method creates a stylized gourd and not something realistic. Otherwise, I am left with a very high poly model. Because the leaf also has a high poly count. Leaf has around 400 faces and vertices and has a subsurf 1. So the whole thing will get very slow and resource hungry.
Well.. low poly is a very unprecise denomination.. and “we” do not know that you are after..
..when mentioning only “low poly”. You maybe should have elaborated the wanted poly count in the first place to get a more suited answer ?
So you may try the decimate modifier to skrink this down to some level you are fine with and apply this then (and bake from high to that new low poly model).
Also when you…
.. , “we” also do not know how close you want them to be “seen” and so how “realistic” this should be. 
They don’t have as such requirement on what the poly count should be. They don’t even know how the software works. But They want the fruit to be seen. And it is going to be close. Some other plant I have made:
Should look just believable enough but not low poly to look like a 90s game model. Anyway, I am trying your method with a map and decimate modifer so let’s see how it goes
This.. is not even a requirenment to be needed to be mentioned. But there need to be a more precise condition/requirement ( defined or specified somehow in some contract ?) about “the look”..
Also with what this is just.. for example UE5 and nanite ?
So.. this might be an XY problem.. there is some requirenment to be fullfilled but there is no precise description (at least not here) and the question asked here is only about how to create some low poly version..
So @NiklasWerth suggestion about some LOD system might be good to investigate or for nanite (AFAIK) this might be different..
You may have to elaborate this to get a more suited answer.
You can look at my model and take a guess how low poly the model can go? depending on the details of the leaf and such?
Why my baked texture is not giving good results?
In fact with my initial idea of low poly i thought that your first two images are already pretty good.. maybe a bit more "work at the silhouette…
So when you mentioned “they” i assume you are talking about your customer/ employer… but then there should be some kind of specification about this.
As i tried to explain: there is very little information about this here.. so i’m proberly not in the position to tell you anything about this.
All i can say is: some nice suggestions already, especially from @NiklasWerth which i at first didn’t understood when you first talked about lowpoly and “seeing a a field from afare” and before you was talking more about this “realistic”.
So this is more about how to optimize some highpoly realistic asset when seen from afare and lot’s of it. And what render engine to use for this..
And this information is still not mentioned here. So.. hard to tell when your working conditions are this “sketchy”.. i think you have to talk to some supervisor, employer, customer.
There is no specific. But my other models are pretty close to realistic. And this is the only fruit that is giving me trouble. I will go with the textured verison if my current version fails. Right now I am modeling individual bumps. Then I will stick smaller bumps as a bump map.
You can’t use a normal map for displacement!
it needs to be greyscale I know. But that will push me to at least a subsurf of 5
Use it as intended as a normal map, and then you can add a Bump Map for the extra detail…
Yeah I need at least minimum of 3 variation so they do not look identical. Displacement modifier is not working unless I go heavy on subd.
Which renderer are you going to use? If it’s Cycles, you could use adaptive subdivision combined with material displacement. This can get both lighter and more detailed than the displacement modifier.
Adaptive subdivision adds more detail close to the camera and less detail far away. It also works with material displacement, so it can be used to make extremely detailed stuff with relatively low impact.
Here is a crude example I made in 5 minutes.
adaptive_displacement_fruits.blend (137.7 KB)
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An other way would be to decimate your sculpt to a lower polygon count, then use that directly without trying to bake the detail to a texture. Decimate can reduce by a surprising amount before you can start telling.
Then, you spread that decimated mesh around using instancing (either through alt+d, or with the scatter modifier if that fits your use case). Instancing is quite powerful for rendering large amounts of objects, you won’t even need the mesh to be that low-poly at all.
Here is what the result can look like.
instancing_decimate.blend (2.1 MB)
Please review whether the following Addon might be helpful
I am doing something else right now. Will revert soon if this works. But then I don’t have a texture of the skin.
