What have I been up to since the last post?
TL;DR - More of that foliage stuff with pictures :)
Since the last blog post I've been working away on lots of different things. I've been making ground materials, tree variations, more small plants, created a landscape material, begun work on a new type of tree bark, and started bringing in some Megascans assets to see how they work with my assets.
I've still got quite a way to go, but things are starting to feel right. All of the shots here are not of any final scene, they're all just part of a asset testing area.
More Hemlocks
In the last blog post I showed off the Western Hemlock Bark and Tree that I'd been working on. I was really happy with my first proper tree, and have been making size variations to show the tree in different stages. I've created some more medium size variations, a large one, and a bunch of small ones. I've also started working on the Western Red Cedar textures, but they're looking a bit rough right now, will hopefully look better by the next update.
I've also updated the marmoset scene a bit, still not quite what I want, but it's a step in the right direction. The textures haven't change much since the last update, still need to work on some feedback. The Western Hemlock bark needs some extra detail and albedo variation as it looks very clean and pristine compared to the scan assets I've brought into the scene, and even to some of my ref images.
Small Plants
I've made a bunch of small plants to join the wild strawberry and the poison ivy, and I feel like the repetition of making these has built a tonne of confidence in creating plants. I've stuck to the same workflow of modelling in Zbrush and texturing in painter, and I've got some good presets to help speed me through the process now. There are some I'm really happy with, and some that could use some love, but I'll probably leave these where they are for now.
Ground Materials
As I mentioned in the last blog post, I'm not very experienced in using Substance Designer, and creating the ground materials has proven to be a pretty big challenge. I tried making a dirt material a few different times, and each time I got overwhelmed by the amount of things I needed to create in my reference. Sticks, dead needles, fallen leaves, rocks, etc. Trying to get it all into one graph became quickly confusing and also pretty laggy, so I decided to split each scatter component into a separate graph and create variations to sample in each of my ground materials. Trial and error is slowly improving my workflow. Studying the works of Daniel Thiger, Willi Hammes, and Pete Mc Nally, amongst others, all helped work out how to build these materials and what to aim for.
Landscape Material
Instead of using distance field blending like I've done before, I thought I'd experiment with Runtime Virtual Texturing. I followed this video by MR3D-Dev on how to set it up for a project, and also picked up Kay Volbeda's RVT Plugin. Although I didn't use assets, it was very useful to see it used in a scene and take apart his set up. The blending with RVT looks really good, and the controls per material are very flexible. Definitely better than using the old distance field method.
Megascans
One of my goals for the project was to see if I could get my assets looking good alongside Megascans assets. I've found it's been good to train the eye and to breakdown references for the smallest of details. In some of my asset arrangements, the result is fairly convincing, but in others, there are still a few detail gaps. The scans provide a very good quality assurance pass for my work and it's definitely helped highlight some gaps in my work.
What's next?
Here's another list of what I want to try achieve for the next update;
- Plant cover ground material
- Pebble shore ground material
- Ivy cluster assets
- Make some waterfall vfx
- Get a river spline
- Western Red Cedar material and branches
- Start assembling the scene.
I managed to stick to my last list pretty well, so here's hoping I can do the same again.
Thanks for reading to the end if you managed, as I said last time I'm just learning stuff right now so if you have questions the best I can do is shoot the resources that taught me your way. Thanks again to the lovely people keeping me motivated and focused on this one, I love ya.