How to make these things look better?

Here’s a render of my scene, I’m talking about the round trees/bushes at the end of the room.

Here’s a reference photo for what they should look like:
http://i.imgur.com/DnNu3.jpg

I want them to look as realistic as the other plants I have in the room. Keep in mind, that my models need to be optimized to work and look good in the game engine, so no crazy high poly stuff.

I’m …okay with what they look like for now, but I’m not crazy about it. If I can make them look better but still work just fine and not slow down the game engine, I’d love to do that.

Thanks!

Try using some sub surface scattering

I’m talking more on the modelling side of things. SSS doesn’t help me much since this will eventually be used in the game engine.

are you sure your game will run fast enough with a high poly object like that in your scene?

Maybe add an alpha texture combined with stencil ramp mapped to the normal. This way there will be transparent areas between the leaves breaking up the perfectly round outline, while the middle part will still look thick and opaque. I haven’t tried this yet, but it should work with glsl

No, that’s why I said I wanted a low poly alternative that looked better than what I have now, similar in quality to my other plants. For those I just have a bunch of planes with leaf or branch textures, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do that with this.

what do you mean by stencil ramp?

I made a rough example material here: http://andeye.dnsalias.net/goran/lowpolybush.blend
Please note that some of the textures are taken from cgtextures, which they cannot be freely distributed unless bundled with a model.

Interesting, thanks!

A little update. I haven’t really worked on this scene very much, but I came back to it recently and I noticed something wrong. The tree works pretty good with the above solution, however it looks all wrong in reflections:


(in the game engine)

Anybody have any idea if this can be fixed?

Holy…
This is one great-looking set. Very nice. It would be a great render outside the GE. Very nice.
As far as that reflection goes, isn’t there a setting to the reflection of the glass where you can tell it the max distance that things to be reflected can be? Or am I thinking of Yafaray?
At any rate, if that setting is in BI, just increase the max distance a few feet. Or increase the sampling of the reflection a little. That should do it.

It’s not a problem with max distance, it’s the material of the tree, which is based on camera angle. As you can see there are still things in the reflection further than the tree.

btw, here’s a wider shot of the scene if you’re interested:

http://i.imgur.com/fmehxl.jpg
(click for higher res)

The black areas are textures I haven’t rendered yet. I’m rendering textures using yafaray and orthographic cameras (as well as disabled reflection for the surfaces I’m rendering). Although some of the more complicated objects may need to be done by other means, such as AO and environmental lighting baking. Not sure what’s up with the dark corners but they aren’t as obvious in game.

This is being done for the “Explore the White House” project:

http://www.explorethewhitehouse.com/

(The page has older BI renders as well as yafaray renders)

I’m actually visiting the white house in a couple weeks.