MATERIALS
This week I focused on material creation, using the tiling tree bark material as my guinea pig for testing. Developing the look of the materials is something I'm really invested in with this project. I've been trying to find the balance between realistic material definition and painterly stylization. One of the main downfalls with the typically seen hand-painted style is often that the light is permanently painted into the diffuse texture. Sometimes this looks nice, but it doesn't allow for the light to change and can come off as a bit flat. It's been especially important for me to find a method for creating normal maps that are a bit chunkier and planar looking, because that's sort of the way light hits are depicted in painting.
This image to the right is my first test to create a stylized bark normal map. This would be a tiling map used on all the trunks and branches of my trees. I created this normal map in Zbrush because I feel like sculpting is what will get me the closest to a more unique, hand-crafted style. However, in this first trial, I struggled a lot with sculpting this detail on a flat plane. My method was using the Clay Buildup brush to build up the surface, then polish it back down with Trim Dynamic and hPolish. It came out much too busy for my taste. I've also been playing around with possibilities in the shader for changing the way the material acts when light hits it. This hasn't been as successful so far. I'm doubting that custom lighting is a good solution for what I want to do. It accounts for direct light, but it's hard to figure out how indirect lighting will work. I also would like a softer look with very ethereal light, and I'm not sure I'll be able to accomplish this without utilizing real lights. It's a bit hard to tell anything is actually happening here, but this is a test where I experimented with custom lighting in a material. The idea I had for this was to essentially use the pixel normal, based on the normal map, and change the diffuse color based on if the pixel normal is facing the custom light vector. I think I need to do some more work to get this to work like I had been envisioning it. I was going for a patchy look, but this is a bit too toon-shadey and flat for my taste. | This is a test diffuse map I painted for the tree bark. It's getting the color palette and the stroke stylization that I want, but it is too busy looking. When paired with my normal maps, it minimized the depth that the normal map offered. It was also painted way too dark, and leveling seemed to crush the values. This second image is starting to get the sort of simplified, planar stylization that I want. The way I created this one was using the same sort of tools, but I discovered it was much easier to achieve this multi-directional faceted look by sculpting onto a cylinder rather than a flat plane. |
This most recent iteration shows the diffuse and normal working together a bit better, resulting in something a bit closer to what I envision as the material style for this project. Again, he normal was done by sculpting in Zbrush and I painted a texture based on the normal. I'd like to add some more color variation in the strokes of the diffuse color to get that feeling of mixed paint and unexpected hues to make up an overall impression of a color. Bark is a naturally rough material and I'm still trying to figure out the role of the roughness map in my material, how much it might be needed for something like this, or if it could be painted in a certain way to enhance the look I'm trying to get. For example, maybe a patchy brush stroke roughness map with hard-edged transitions between strokes would provide an interesting painterly variation when light hits it. This is my next step in experimenting.
Aaand finally, here is some questionable progress on the procedural spline tree. It's umm. Getting there. I've found that the best system for this is to add Blueprints within Blueprints. So, basically, the main Blueprint is the trunk Blueprint, which deforms cylindrical pieces along a spline that is editable per instance, and along that spline, branch Blueprints are placed at a random location, both in distance along the spline and radially around the circumference of the cylindrical trunk. |
Problems with this right now:
1. The branch mesh I'm using as a test a bit too sculpted on its own and most of the deformation of it should be left to the spline. I will also need maybe a few different branch meshes that can be interchanged for the sake of variety.
2. There are currently no parameters controlling how these branches are placed, other than how many of them there should be. So, in the future, there will need to be parameters that control the tendencies of the branches (angle, twisty-ness, length) as well as parameters for intelligently placing them so that some aren't clumped together, or colliding with each other.
3. There's an odd seam between the cylindrical pieces on the trunk that I need to figure out.
4. I want the trunk to be able to split into two large primary branches rather than go all the way up.
5. Still working on my method for placing the additional mesh planes with brush strokes along the spline meshes.
1. The branch mesh I'm using as a test a bit too sculpted on its own and most of the deformation of it should be left to the spline. I will also need maybe a few different branch meshes that can be interchanged for the sake of variety.
2. There are currently no parameters controlling how these branches are placed, other than how many of them there should be. So, in the future, there will need to be parameters that control the tendencies of the branches (angle, twisty-ness, length) as well as parameters for intelligently placing them so that some aren't clumped together, or colliding with each other.
3. There's an odd seam between the cylindrical pieces on the trunk that I need to figure out.
4. I want the trunk to be able to split into two large primary branches rather than go all the way up.
5. Still working on my method for placing the additional mesh planes with brush strokes along the spline meshes.
CONCEPTS
Thinking a bit on how I can make some interesting and unexpected trees. Here are some surreal variations on trees- one ties in industrial elements like pipes, the other forms some sort of pseudo house structure. More paintings defining my spaces are in the works.
WORK LOG
Sculpting for normal map stylization: 13 hours
Painting diffuse/roughness maps to develop painterly style: 5 hours
Testing custom lighting in materials and post processes: 8 hours
Sketching and painting concepts: 2 hours
Blog: 30 minutes
Painting diffuse/roughness maps to develop painterly style: 5 hours
Testing custom lighting in materials and post processes: 8 hours
Sketching and painting concepts: 2 hours
Blog: 30 minutes