Creator Wizard Seth Dev Log #8 - Beginning to Create Trees

www.creatorwizardseth.com 


A couple of very simple shots. Some large rocks on a hilltop, and some grass in a field. Here I decided instead of producing more pictures of grass and rocks together, and more developed in their placement, I would simply move towards producing acceptable shrubs and trees and move towards an image of grass, rocks, shrubs, and trees altogether. 



Now here is a small tree branch.


Here is the same branch but expanded a little bit.


And now a prototype of a tree's frame.


Some adjustments to the tree frame to make it more natural and balanced. It still needs more work, but this is better.


Here we can see a render of the prototype tree with a single branch populated with leaves.


And now the major portion of the bottom of the tree is filled out.


And here we have our completed prototype. It is flaws in several ways, the balance of the leaves and branches is not very good, the thickness of the branches needs work, and we need higher leaf density.





Made the leaves a bit larger to fill extra space with less geometry.


And some variations on color and subsurface scattering settings to see if they make a difference in the final render quality.







Have a great day.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creator Wizard Seth Dev Log #7 - Painting the Terrain

Image
www.creatorwizardseth.com It's time to build a landscape. Lets get a 512 X 512 noise grid. Wait, I forgot my laptop is an old piece of junk lets try something low resolution. Now ill just raise up the center a bit to form a mountain as my centerpiece. Then I'll paint the low areas a red muddy dirt and the high areas a gray rocky material. Apply some blending. More blending. Showing a view from the ground looking outward. We can see it's starting to feel like an actual environment. Showing 3 steps of blending on a certain hill feature. In this picture notice the slight color variations of light blue and some reds. Another iteration of blending and smoothing. Adding a more saturated red dirt near the base of the mountains Zap all the high frequency details with a smooth modifier. You may think it looks much uglier. And from the sky you are correct. However high frequency bumps and such will get in the way visually of a first person shooting game and should be avoided. High fr...
Read more

Creator Wizard Seth Dev Log #12 - Leaf And Branch Complexity Improved

Image
So today the goal is to move towards the maximum level of detail possible for tree branches, which is that every single leaf is placed by hand and rotated to fit the twig that it is on. And every leaf must be connected directly to a twig. If I can achieve this, then there is no more room for improvement as far as what level of detail I am working on. There will be no higher resolution to work in. But first I am going to continue my trajectory of working with puffy clouds of leaves and simply cut the size of the leaf clusters in half again to further increase the level of detail and control that I have over the shape of the leaf canopy. When I create a tree with this method then I am ready to move into the highest resolution of working at the leaf level. This will also give me a reference photo to test against in case working at the leaf level does not provide additional benefit, then in this case I will revert to puffy leaf clouds as it is significantly faster. I am at this point fairl...
Read more

Creator Wizard Seth Dev Log #6 - Shifting Gears Towards Natural Environments

Image
So things have taken a new interesting turn. Although I have been completely saturated in my quest for mastery of concrete, brick, and plaster structures and I have put off the development of terrain thinking that I could get away with structures only and a courtyard with a tile or brick floor. While this is possible, it is becoming clear that it is more difficult than it looks to produce a result that is good enough for even a version 1.0 build. I'm not looking for perfection, I am converging on a threshold of quality for the release of my game. Balanced between releasing utter garbage such as a map that is simply an array of cubes on a flat plane and spending 10 years perfecting the craft and creating multistory interconnected super complex structures and labyrinth mazes with realistic levels of detail.  So we have a gray terrain that is randomly generated. Randomly generated offers us something that is guaranteed to be balanced although the procedural nature of the terrain does...
Read more