So, what's all this then?
TL;DR - I'm learning how to make foliage and writing about the journey. pictures included.
After wrapping up the Vending Machine last year, I decided that I'd learned enough about prop creation for the meantime. I've in no way mastered the craft, but I'm happy with what I've learned, and it's time for something new. I know very little about creating foliage, so I want to learn more about it and the tools used to create it.
My desire for this project is to not make every plant for a scene, but to develop the skills to be able to tackle foliage for projects when I need too. I find myself too worried about working on certain scenes or concepts because I can't tackle the organic elements and I hope by the end of this project I will have slain that fear.
What I've done so far
So far, I've been working on a collection of different foliage assets that you might find in the Pacific Northwest of America. If all goes well and I keep my motivation for this up, I plan to create a small forest scene in that area. As of right now, I've been working on a Western Hemlock Tree, Western Sword Ferns, English Ivy, Wild Strawberry Plants, and Poison Ivy.
Western Hemlock - Tree
The Western Hemlock was the first asset I approached as it required the steepest learning curve. The Western Hemlock was a pretty good starter tree as it's got simple forms. The shot above shows the only variation I've made so far, "Medium_01". I plan to make smaller versions, medium variations and much larger ones. Apparently the tree can grow up to 175 ft tall, which will be a fun challenge to create.
I'm happy with the main shape, but there's still a few lingering issues with this first tree. The top of the tree doesn't look quite correct, I struggled with getting the top of the tree to bend properly as I'd seen in my ref. The top of the tree is supposed to slump a lot more, and the branches are supposed to get much thinner. I've struggled to achieve this with my current branch and leaf set up, and I'll change it for the next versions.
Example of the top of real Western Hemlock
My atlas is missing some smaller pieces and individual pine cones / needles, but I'm pretty content with the main branches so far. To create these, I modeled and textured some high poly needles and pine cones, then brought them into Speedtree to assemble some branches using the basic branch template. Some of needles are clipping with each other in places, but I haven't been able to work out how to use Collision. I've found that the Speedtree YouTube tutorials vary massively in quality making it a little tough to learn from there.
Western Hemlock - Bark
Old Marmoset Render, Still trying to work out a nice way to render materials in this. Cubes are so much easier!
I wanted to create two versions of the Western Hemlock bark, one with sawn / fallen branch spots, and one without so that I could blend between the two based on tree height. The shapes were a lot of fun to work out, and creating the sawn branch spots was probably the most fun I'd had in Designer. I'll probably share shots of the graph when I've un-spaghettied it.
Again, although i'm happy with the bark, there's still a few issues to resolve. To pick out a couple of big ones; the sawn branch version has some awkward double lines I need to fix, there are some really obvious areas of small bark cracks which don't blend in nicely, and the textures could use a bit more colour variation. I'm not sure whether I want to add macro variation in engine or push the textures further.
To help with break up on the all the trees and assets that require it, I've been adding vertex painting to my materials. So far, I've been experimenting with some different moss types. On the left, you have a more common fibrous and thick moss. I'm not getting the read or blending that I'd like, and I feel like there isn't enough colour variation throughout. It's not been the easiest thing to create in designer, but I'll keep iterating on it and studying the ref until it feels good. On the right I've made an older, drier moss that you might see higher up on trees and in drier seasons or climates.
Western Sword Ferns
The Fern was the first big plant for the project, but it went a lot smoother than I had imagined. I created the main leaves in Zbrush / Painter and brought into Speedtree for assembly. I've created a couple of small, medium, and large variations and I imagine there will be enough variety if they were thrown into a forest scene.
I modeled in some smaller fly away leaves to add a bit of a 3D feel to what is just bent flat planes. I probably could have pushed these further as they don't break the silhouette as much as I would have liked, but the effect is cool from some angles. I could also optimize these further and make better shapes with the amount of geometry I've spent, but these are lessons to take to the next assets. I also learned that I should paint my vertex colour at this stage to avoid having to try and paint it on finished clusters...
To create the young unfurling branch, I hand placed the leaves in Maya, created a furry vine in the middle with Xgen, Textured in Painter, then used Substance Designer to bake down the textured high poly model onto a side and front plane. The crossed billboards look pretty good for the front, but I had to model the head in 3D as it just wasn't looking great in 2D.
Finally, I created some fallen scattered branches that can be placed underneath the ferns. I'll make a couple of variations of these as I've found they really help age the plants and ground them in the scene. I also added some very basic hueshift and desaturation controls so I could age and decay some of the fallen branches.
Decals
I've not dived too deeply into decals this project, but I've still learned a couple of cool things in designer. The first thing I created was this cracked bark decal generator. It relies on a shape input, but the rest works it self out quite nicely. Although my ref for these cracks are pretty clean, I think it could do with some more details like little moss and dirt spots and build up.
I've also created some scattered floor leaves and needle decals to place under the plants. I discovered the atlas scatter node (which is probably very much common knowledge already) and it basically does all of the scattering work for me. I bring in my textured high poly sheet, create a material, plug the material into a atlas scatter node, add some colour variation, and bring it into engine. Simple as that.
I'm hoping that the scatter node will be helpful for blending when I start working on ground materials. Being able to blend these in should help tie the scene together nicely.
Ivy
For each leaf and pine needle, I'm creating high resolution high poly / baked assets. I check them out in Unreal before starting to assemble my atlas and clusters just to make sure the material is reading okay. These ivy leaves look a little over-detailed and noisy, but the extra noise helps when they're baked down into clusters.
I've been building various Ivy Clusters in Speedtree, but I've encountering more and more issues with collision. It takes me quite a long time to get a nice looking cluster without too much clipping, but I've probably got enough clusters now to create an atlas.
Wild Strawberry and Poison Ivy
The most recent addition to the project has been some ground cover plants. I hope to get 5/6 different ground cover plants with some different flowers and colours. As of right now, I've got some medium and small clusters of Wild Strawberry plants and Poison Ivy. Smaller flowering and fruit bearing plants are going to be the best way to add nice little bits of colour for this scene. They look a little noisy right now on the blockout floor, but I imagine they'll lose a lot of that contrast when placed in forest dirt. I felt a lot more confident building these compared to the ferns which was a nice achievement.
What's next?
Here's a little list of things I hope to achieve for the next update;
- Ground dirt material
- Western Hemlock variations
- Western Red Cedar tree and materials
- Some small grass tufts
- Oxalis bloom clusters
- Rattlesnake Plantain plant
- Orange Honeysuckle plant
No promises that I'll get them all done, just going to focus on learning something along the way.
Thanks for reading, I didn't go into much detail about where I've been learning from or how I've been making things, so if you have any questions, feel free to comment or shoot me a DM. Or you can wait for a more comprehensive write up if I ever finish this. To the people who've been giving me feedback and tips so far, thank you very much, it means a lot!