Since a couple of weeks (with a large break in between couple of months) I Started this project to get to know speedtree and to get my foliage to look as good as I could (mainly because I was so inspired by Uncharted 4 foliage and the talks about them from Jacob Norris over on CGSociety.
I am making slow progress but I just love to experiment with new features and tips/tricks I get along the way.
Feel free to give me any feedback/critique, I’m trying to get to a point of realism with this, and I know that I can improve a lot! Especially on the lighting of the environment.
And I am still deciding if I’m gonna put them up on the marketplace or not, but no definitive plans for them as of yet, I just want to improve first and then I can worry bout that
You can also checkout my Trello board to have a look at what I got planned.
Suggestions are always welcome.
Things I have thinkered around with on this project so far
Getting to know dynamic lights, and all the dynamic shadow settings
Light propagation volumes (Also know as Dynamic Global Illumination, Experimental feature)
Speedtree (had no prior experience with this program)
Balancing SSS on foliage material
Some plugins for maya to scatter foliage on a surface (painter in maya as well)
My progress so far, some earlier screenshots as well.
The initial grass blades, these are still used now, but I plan to bake them down onto a plane to reduce the polycount heavily. But I’m also pondering over trying to lod them out super quickly and see what result this gives me.
I really love this project so far, although, the challenge of doing bark textures is upon me, maybe I’ll use substance designer to get me some nice tileables.
Anyways, thinkered around with some more models, did some updates to the grass (make it less costly) and added textures for palm leaves.
Was also thinking about logical foliage placement and trying to do something more then just filling everything up with grass like you see in the screen below. That doesn’t mean I don’t like the screenshot at all, I do think it’s nice, but I need to kill my darlings if I want to achieve some sense of realism here (and giving the viewer some guidelines as well)
Some water shader test while we are at it, these are actually ones I used in some of the previous projects as well, just trying to give em something more and adding the polish that it needs (and it still needs a lot of it hahaaa )
Let me know what you guys think of this! I still have a long way to go, but I am doing it because I want to learn new stuff, explore and mainly have fun!
It has been a while, super busy at work!
But I am back with an update!
Started working on a day/night cycle, working on the basics now, not sure if Im going to use the full day tho to present this scene.
But nevertheless it is something useful I can keep in my asset library and improve upon!
As well as a screenshot with the updated grass/models/textures.
Did some more work on the lighting, as well as added some more ground/low foliage.
Also added some initial blockouts for rocks to test the World aligned blend on.
Still need to add some more ground foliage to vary it up some more as well as make the trees a bit mossier, add some hanging vines and all that stuff.
Gonna work some more on the lighting and color variation first tho
If you have any suggestions/comments they are much appreciated.
Great shape work here, but I feel the textures are letting you down! I’d recommend trying out Megascans textures to create these assets- will give you WAY more detail and depth, especially since you’ll have all maps scanned. Keep up the good work!
Thanks so much for the comment! I have looked at them already and they look amazing, and you work with them is amazing as well (I have them as backgrounds on my work PC haha).
But that said, I am trying to get a realistic feeling without using megascans and just modelling/sculpting them. And then making the textures for them myself.
I am working on the textures at the moment to make them more detailed and varied (still need to work on the variance as of yet tho)
I also did some work on the AO and the lighting in general, And it is looking way better then it was before.
(Pointers and tips are still appreciated greatly!)
Did some more work over the last time, also completely remade my site from scratch and made it easier to keep it up to date.
Have a look over at www.timothydries.com.
Back to this!
Gonna post the latest iteration, currently deciding on the the light angle and getting into the final stages of the scene and then preparing to move onto the next one!
I really like the first one, but I am going to add some finishing touches such as very subtle godrays and some other volumetric stuff as well.
Gonna do some other time of day stuff as well and maybe do a flythrough at the end.
And I will also drop a link to my artstation so you can see my upcoming and previous projects as well.
Thanks for all the nice feedback and comments guys! Really appreciate it a ton!
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