Here’s a reference photo for what they should look like:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
(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: