Looks good, finaly

Well after a lot of help from Aarku and Neil (thanx guys) and a lot of personal experimenting I was able to get some trees looking good for a little test scene that actually looks decent. It might be to high polly though, but now that I know it can be done I can work on cutting the poly count down.

I'm using 4 meshes for the terrain (you can see the joint ) but hey at least that way I can get a less pixelated texture. Sure wish I could get some decent looking water. Well let me know what you think, this is just a days messing around. Yoggy and I hope to create an RPG with graphics like this. Jeff

 

I think they look pretty darn good. The thing I'd work on is the lighting... it looks a bit flat. Is your ambient set really high per chance?

Cheers,
-Jon

 

Yah it kind of is, I guess rather than putting the ambiance up real high I should put real lights in. I'll post some more pictures when I get it farther along. Thanx for the suggestion Aarku. Jeff

 

Nice one. Are your trees generated from Vue 5? I just realised that the bark portion of the texture is missing on my exported trees, will have to look into it.
Boxy

 

Yes they are from Vue 5. But I'm not to happy with them. They were around 10,000 polys apiece and when I start to lower the polys I see there were really poorly made. If I can get the hang of UV Mapping I could make my own with out to much difficulty. Jeff

 

I agree, not particularly happy witht the low res results, but I guess looking at the leaf alpha/colour maps has at least given me an idea of how to do the foliage if I attempt to build my own. I also don't like how the trunk exports as separate segments but I think vue is still useful for making billboard trees from high res renders within vue - now if only I was a programming wizard I would seriously look into speed tree
Boxy.

 

Could I get one of you Vue-owning guys to send me an exported tree w. textures all? Would love to see how it manages its polys and what needs to be done in order for it to render optimally in Unity.

 

Just sending you one now by email, its about 5mb
Sav

 

Thanks...

Took a look at it in Unity, and a few things to optimize it a bit would be:

* Join all the objects into one
* Polyreduce the leaves, so you have one quad per leaf...
* Possibly kill off some of the leaves as well....

Apart from that, the Diffuse texture looks a bit weird to me; The leaves seem to be duplicated 5 times, and be really lo res. What gives?

What's the copyright status on these files? Would it be possible for OtEE to buy Vue, make 5 trees and ship the exported trees with Unity?

 

Apart from that: The way to create an alpha map from a set of color + grayscale alpha textures is to load the color image up in photoshop, open the Channels Pallette, create an alpha channel and copy the grayscale transparency info it. Unity will then import the texture with the alpha channel used for transparency.

If you load the transparency as a selection, and delete the pixels from the color (so you get a semitransparent image in photoshop), you will get white fringes in Unity.

 

One note to add, make sure you click the Alpha Channels tab in the Exported document type, not even PSD's do this by default (at least they didn't for me).

Also if what you started with didn't come with an Alpha image, then in PhotoShop manually delete the background, Merge the layers if you have any. Then right click (Control Click if you don't have a two button mouse) on the Thumbnail of the layer in the layers pallet and click on "select layer transparency". Now hit the tab to go to the channels pallet and click the "save selection as Channel" button (it's a black box with a white circle in it and is located at the bottom of the pallet). Last go back to the layers pallet make a new layer, use the paint bucket to make it black. Stick it below the current layer and flatten the image.

Yah Boxy, the Vue trees have been helpful in showing how you could make a tree. But I do agree that the trunk being different segments is quite bothersome, and there are way to many ploys used for the leaves. Maybe you and I should put together something like Speed Tree but simpler and cheaper for the Unity people. Yoggy and I are hoping to implement some sort of LOD for use on foliage. Let me know what you think, seeing as the two of us are all into getting as much foliage on a map as we can [/b]

 

Thanks guys, I don't know what the copyright is but I presume you can do what you want with the models as long as you own vue in the first place - they are user definable so I guess each one you tweak is an original work...

I think I will have a go at creating my own trees and see if I can do a better job. With ZBrushes Zpheres it shouldn't be too tricky to create the trunk/branch framework - and actually with ZB I would also be able to make detailed normal maps of the trunk etc...in theory anyway...
Outcast I would love to get something going that would help easily add grasses, trees and bushes to Unity environments. I guess the only way I could help is by building models as I have no programming experience, but yeah, a cheap flora plugin would be awsome! Ooh its autumn now, the perfect time to go out and photograph tree/leaf textures!
Lets keep in touch on it.
Boxy

 

Ok great! if you have an IM app my IM's are listed in my profile I think. I'm also more of an artist person so if we can provide LOD modles for Yoggy then he can work on figuring out a system for implementing the LOD. Then we can get a more programer type to join the project and creat a plug in or something . Do you need pro to use a plug in? Jeff