Hi guys, texturing some branches for my pine trees for the WW1 project, except I don’t have a camera so I had to make these out of CG textures. Any suggestions?
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First of all you should have some better quality and higher resolution scans/photos of the twigs. Then prepare something like this:
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for color:
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for alpha:
thanks, but i don’t think you can re distribute images from cgtextures in this way.
as for the images themselves, are you planning to use them as alpha planes, like you would a normal leaf image? if so i would say they look fine if the tree is going to be a background element, if however the tree is going to be a forground element i would suggest using particle systems to get the right look
they look like photos without background to me.
Yes, they have alpha maps too. I will be applying them as a group particle system, any suggestion for this?
only suggestion is to play with it to get the best look, you’ll want to have hair type particles set to render the group,don’t use children, and use a vertex weight paint group to adjust the leangth so its smaller at the top to get that cone shape. Other than that its just a case of tweaking numbers
Hair and not emitter, got it. How about the texture though?
just create the texture on the planes as normal, and the particle system should just reference the texture from the object in the group. one last thing, make sure the origin point of all the twig planes for your group is at the base of the plane as the emmitter uses the origin point as the point of growth, so if the point is in the middles then the branches will be half in the tree
I’ve done all of that, it turned out horribly. I’d post a picture but I’m running a scan on my computer. Some of the branches are too far out, the inside looks good but I had to turn on 3000 particles, way too much I think.
well, once your done scanning post a blend of the tree and we’ll see whats what, dont forget to pack the textures
edit: oh, well they look organic at least… they will be ok as back ground elements but post the tree file and we can poe about with it
I already appended to the main file before adding those textures, my fault. Any ideas what to do with these particles? I could comb them?
I’m not sure you can effectively comb objects. it might help to organise them but i’m not sure. the trouble is the shape of them. looking at the image i think the way normal pine branches are is different to how your images would emit from the actual branch. i think the way you want your hairs is to lie flat along the branch and extend outwards with as little upright or down facing hairs as possible. i have tried messing with various settings but haven’t got a good position for the planes which is quite frankly annoying! i think i am going to have to admit defeat with planes and refer you to a recent blender guru tutorial if you haven’t already seen it. ignoring all the christmassy bits, its a pine tree at the end of the day and looks quite good.
RIP Polycount. These look good in my opinion, but they are each 5 times over the limit. Should I just raise the limit again and buy a renderfarm for a day if it makes it to rendering?
why do you have a limit? there are some tricks you can employ like creating seperate scenes and utilising renderlayers use low poly or even billboards for background assets. basically, cheat wherever you can
I have a polylimit of 2 million per scene, these 6 together are 50,000. If I can’t get enough render volunteers when this project comes out, I have to spend my money to rent a renderfarm. Do you think 2 million verts per scene is too strict? I’d love to see 3, 4, maybe 5 million vertices in a scene, and imagine how great the graphics would be!
Btw its destined to be a movie (if we can find some animators and a voice actor who sounds like this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpxd3pZAVHI (0:05 - 0:16)
Alt-D duplicates don’t add to the render the same as Shift-D duplicates. sp long as there is no subsurface modifier - so I wonder if you can use the same trick to flesh out the area you need to fill while using more unique variations in the front by camera?
Oh yeah that’s right, thanks! I didn’t take that into account with trees since I was going for a particle effect, I assume it still counts then?