Hello,
I’m trying to get some clarification on the unique style of leaves featured in this tutorial by Victoria Zavhorodnia as well as a simplified version of the same effect illustrated here by Marpetak Dev. I am unable to duplicate the effects seen in both videos after following their instructions closely and could use some advice or suggestions from other artists that could help me figure out how to get a better result, especially since I do not know anyone personally who I could reach out to.
Both artists are extremely descriptive about how they achieved these effects, for which I am very grateful. However, when I plug in Marpetak’s watered down version of the material and apply it to my geometry, instead of achieving the results Marpetak reveals just after the normals are fixed:
my leaves look nothing like it:
and I’ve followed the instructions word for word. After following Victoria’s instructions, I can at least get the shadows to become lighter, but I cannot achieve the clumped shading effect noticeable in the attached screenshot and also noticeable in Marpetak’s screenshot:
If one were to use Blender, you could achieve a similar effect by creating a Normal Edit or Data Transfer modifier and transferring the normal shading to a separate spherical object. I’m not seeing either of these artists do an equivalent of these techniques in Unreal, in both tutorials the effect seems to work immediately after the material is created mostly due, it seems, to the setup plugged into the Normal of each respective material.
A few things I assumed I was doing wrong include the creation of the tree and how I’ve clumped the leaves together. I downloaded Tree It which both artists use and created a tree as close to Victoria’s as I could get it in addition to creating my own in Blender just to further identify what I’m doing wrong. Both results look the same and the mesh in my attached screenshot is the tree modeled off of Victoria’s with a duplicate inside to make it fuller. And from what I’ve seen online, models with even worse leaf distribution still achieve the fluffy look better than what I’ve been able to accomplish. The other thing I assumed was a culprit was the lighting set up. I figured it’s highly possible that both artists most likely tweaked world settings that aren’t shown in their videos. But Marpetak told a commenter that the lighting setup is pretty much default, as are the settings in mine. The final reason I thought the techniques might not be working for me is the fact that theirs were made in UE4 and mine in UE5. This is one factor I’m unable to be sure about on my own with my very limited knowledge of both engines.
I’ve been fascinated with this style for a while and tried with mixed results replicating it in Blender which is my main 3d program. I only just started using UE5 and the results seen in both of these tutorials are the closest I’ve seen to what I’m trying to achieve. Any help would be greatly appreciated, but thank you to anyone for at least taking the time to read this inquiry.
