Final Year project – Month 2

After the successes of last weeks texturing via painter / designer I went a head and finished texturing all the assets that were ready.

This leads me onto my fiasco with making a tree… I decided to look into speed tree – Horrible idea, not because the soft ware is bad, reminded me much of unreal or designer. The awful part was after i’d finished creating my tree It decided to remove 10% of all polys as a trails tax. This annoyed be as I tried to fix it in maya, but due to its density being at around 20k polys with no way to turn of the leaves it was clogging my time up in maya instead of solving the problem.

So I decided to approach the tree problem another way being traditional using alpha planes with branch and needle textures on to achieve my perfect conifer

Using only nodes found in unreal I managed to piece together a few different thickness of branch to space up and down the tree trunk. This give of a tree-mendus effect compared to the more model based trees I created.

Though this was the monster I created and maybe Photoshop would have been easier but I learned a important lesson in generating foliage in substance designer. This process was then followed up by Grass and Ivy foliage done in the same way – Once exported out, I jumped back into maya and apply them to planes to I could manipulate them into more 3d shapes.

The block out of the tree looks great even without the textures, BUT looks better with .

The slight variations allows them to pop a bit more from the back ground aswell as having some colour variations before UE4 implementation.

Before getting everything into unreal I had to create a basic master material

this has all the basics I need to instance all my textures so I can tinker with them in real time without needing to wait for shaders ever 10 seconds or risk baking after commiting one change.

This swiftly lead onto creating of the master material for the landscape. It was a lot of ups and downs due to using material functions for the first time in any material. They are very useful allowing me to fit more than I should within one material being a 16 texture sample limit.

One of the downsides was I couldn’t get the classical way of tessellation to work.

But this is where Im at end of this blog post waiting on a test bake to see how things look some random primitives ill take out and a few missing textures I haven’t applied yet.