I like trees. Of course there are many ways of creating them (e.g. explained here) but the tree of Airborn got my special attention because when i saw it the first time, i thought:
“Wow, this looks soo fluffy!”
Source: Airborn
I asked in their polycount thread how it’s done and the solution is pretty “simple”. KatziImSack replied and here is the picture:
Source: Airborn
You could use an inverted light vector to lighten up the back faces but that would be too easy. :D
They modified the normals. This means they used the inner “bubble” object as a base and “projected” the normal orientation of it to the leaf “cloud”. So you don’t get too dark/bright faces in the wrong place but a very nice and soft shadow gradient all over the leafs.
Normal Transfer Script: SlideNormalThief @ Slide London
If you think i didn’t explain it good enough, feel free to read more about this in the polycount wiki. There you also find the mentioned script which makes the copy process possible. And of course this link, which is so awesome i have to post it here: It’s about the shading of gras.
Warby told me another very nice advantage about this technique: You avoid too many transparent planes being rendered over each other. The big blob mesh in the middle culls most of them so you only need to care about the stuff of the front/sides.
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Source: Romain Durand
Update 5
I tried to find out a bit more about this, and indeed there is this reddit thread by pomperi with some more information in the comments:
The tree crown consists of a quadrangulated mesh, where each quad face is unwrapped individually to 0-1 in uv space. The shader remaps the uv to -1 to 1 and is then multiplied with the view matrix to transform the uvs into view space, and are then used as a vertex offset in the vertex shader, which makes each face look towards the camera.
Oh, and thank you very much Belzecue for mentioning, that Pontus actually made a full tutorial about that process! Click below!
And Arvin mentioned, another tutorial:
the images don’t seam to load on this post for me, I have tried at a number of different locations with different ISPs. Could you please check to see if the images are actually accessible and if they are not fix that. Thanks
Hm..here it’s working fine. If you want, send me an email, i’ll send you the images directly then.
Freaking brilliant with that lighting solution…
That’s right! So logic … but i never would have thought making it like that by my own.
Hey ! I adore your blog, some of those awesome tricks have recently save my ass ))
Hello Simon, any clue on how to animate the foliage for a game engine, like Unity?
Usually this is done via Vertex Shader. Those shaders can push around vertices and move them for example with a simple sine-curve. By using vertex color, you can mask out the lower parts of the foilage to make it fix/not moving on the ground.
You can google for “animate foilage” or something like that. I found this for example very quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYZcqOcP0B4
Hi! Any advise on how to place all the bases of 3planes into the spheres faces, just manually or there is a better way? It seems to be incredibly obvious to everyone but I can’t find any info on how to do this in Maya
Except from scripting this idea comes into my mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn4oZ0oUL9A
But maybe there are other procedural approaches as well…
Due to recent events with ArtStation, the last update [update 4] now goes nowhere as Roman has flushed out his artstation page.
but I managed to relocate it elsewhere
https://80.lv/articles/creating-stylized-leaves-in-maya/
As well as a copy of it he has up on gumroad
https://rdurand.gumroad.com/l/BoFGo
Thank you so much! I’ve updated the links!
Thank you for maintaining this page. It’s incredibly informative!