The Plant Factory Discussion - share your experience and workflow etc. :)

[Antoine]

Could you post a bigger rendered image ? it's difficult to see the mesh leaves details.

[mhaze]

Here's another tree. using whorl technique for branching plus added painted on trees.  Used the billboard technique but didn't get such good leaf shapes as you, will have to study yours The whorl technique, as you can see, gives bad joins when it come to texturing the mesh.  The modelling process in TPF is great but at the moment texturing sucks.  But importing into TG works ok with a bit of manual texturing.  Leaves are a PF tree image map exported by TPF from a TPF procedural texture.  I'm finding lots of bugs and the texture system which has obviously been ported from Vue causes most of them.

[ADE]

i tried another one but instaed of using planes which were hard to rotate into place and looked like a complete mess I used a cube object to hold the leaf material, exported to tg2...looks ok to me

[ADE]

I hear that on texturing, early days yet

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks for sharing this guys.

I started yesterday with my very first tree.
The first model I'm making now is a poplar. I can see one out of my window so that's easy for reference

I'm doing it slow and systematically, going through all the parameters and see what they do.
So it will take some time for me until I am ready to put some leafs on it.
I'll see if I can use simple planes and deform them with a fractal.
I have seen in the segment shader that you can apply an extra subdivision level of geometry to your segment so by upping that I think I should be able to get gently bent leafs.

Ade, yes you're doing it backwards lol
That doesn't matter that much of course, as long as you get it eventually.

[Antoine]

here a new exportation test. I used warpboard for the leaves and in Terragen, after a few shader settings, it looks good for me.
However, I don't know how to make seemless the bark texture between the trunk and the branches.

[mhaze]

I don't know how to make seemless the bark texture between the trunk and the branches.

You and me both!  I suspect no one really has a solution to this.

[Tangled-Universe]

Hmmm curious...let's have a look at the example models to see how the textures are applied?

I guess you need to do something similar to the textures as with the geometry, like "blend with parent" to have child segment blend with parent segments. Works great. Maybe something like that...

[Walli]

I don´t think that you can have really seamless texture blend between trunk and branches when working with bitmaps only.

[Tangled-Universe]

SpeedTree can, sort of. I think TPF can do too, just by looking at the example renders so far.

Ideally you would do some remapping/retexturing of course.

[cyphyr]

Only guessing here as I have neither Speed Tree or TPF but surly a procedural texture could be made to be seamless and then baked to a UV mapped bitmap ... maybe.
The difficulty would be to create purely procedural fractal textures that look like differing kinds of bark.

[mhaze]

Speedtree has a trick but I'm not sure you can export it as .obj file I think its only fbx.

On a another note if you are trying to image map a blade with alpha info make sure uv extension in the materials tab is turned on

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks for the tip Mick

[Walli]

if you are going with bitmaps only, then this means that trunk texture can´t be tiled anymore - if it´s done the regular way . I know some cheats, but usually you have to cheat different in each application ;-)

So it would be interesting to see, if they have a "global" solution. The only global solution I have seen so far is, to ensure that trunk and each branch is really unwrapped "on it´s own", then you can paint seamless - but not tileable. That on the other hand means, you need really high resolution for the bitmap, otherwise it looks blurry.

As I said, I know several methods to do so, but until know it has been manual work and often had to be adjusted for each application.

[Antoine]

Thanks Walli,

If so, I think the best is to wait for the final version release.