Tree Foliage Normals. For Blender Freaks

[JointVenture]

Hi, i am working on low poly trees.
I’ve painted some Textures with PDHowler and made unique mesh Trees for them.
The Trees are extreme easy and fast to generate, so i can do Trees in short time, …But. There was always a visual Problem with those trees inside Unreal. The folowing Picture showing ugly dark aereas of the two sided foliage, and also with sub surface scattering enabled.
…
The left and the right Tree are uploded as usual, exported with Smoothing Faces:

For getting these better result, i used the “Normal Edit” modifier:

Here are the visual comparison between them:

This Material uses Tangent Space Normals! Also a “TwoSidedSign” for the Normalmap.
I checked the Material to be fully Rough, (for testing), nut that looks not bad at all. after tweaking the Specular exponent ^^:

It may be, that we getting better shading with a schrink-wrapped sphere (to get the same mass point as the foliage). i will try that also.

So far so good, but not perfect jet, please share your experiance with us and me!

[pmlvl]

Problem is more complex here, Even when You set “Two Sided” option You will see the diffrence in “lighting only” mode. This is also depend what tree you have for example Pine tree is easy with shading. Much harder is with Your example or Birch tree becaouse of the lack od consistant regular geometry. Very interesting style with normals is in LandscapeMountains Demo.

[Snigge]

@pmlvl How did the LandscapeMountains Demo tree normals look? Aren’t they just spherical?