BIG Break through with my plant bark texturing

[lightning]

hey guys i have been looking at some of my plants in some of you renders and the quality aint to good so i decided to dsome experimenting and came up with a realy nice way to add bumps to bark
see picture 1

all i do is i in the dicplacment tab in the default shader i select my greyscale bump image which i made in photoshop i usaually always do this but now for the dicplacment function is select an image mapshader with the greyscale bump map selected as well and i set the multipla to .02 this creates realy nice bumps on the bark making my trees just that bit more close to realism

i will reup the acer plantodis tree when i get home im at school at the moment and mediafire and ashundar are blocked which sucks

[lightning]

im also trying to make my leaves more realistic as well not to monotone like they are at the moment
heres on tecnique with just a leaf texture made in photoshop.
i did another tequnique with the same texture just adding a colour fractal in the colour function option in the default shader this just adds a variation of colour in the leaves not just making them one colour.

[rcallicotte]

Nice work.  Not sure what it takes to get their, but I can imagine it's some strong effort.  Looks nice.  I can't wait for transparency to come out...leaves will look so much better.

[lightning]

Its not to hard
im going to do some more work on gettin the leaves to look more realistic

[Tangled-Universe]

Finally somebody who jumps into this aspect of texturing the tree models. I think I've been yelling about this for well over half a year here at the forum.
Good to see you've tried it yourself as well and too see it pays off.
It surely isn't that hard but it really adds to the realism of the bark texture.
These screenshots were from 2 tests I made for my Aleppo Pine I use in my Mediterranean Canyon River image here on the forum:

The scale-multiplier of the model is 35 and therefore the displacement-multiplier is also quite high, e.g. 5 or 10.

[Tangled-Universe]

Using grayscale images as bump-texture doesn't work the best for me. It results in very noizy bumps with spikes etc. The noise is so strong that the actual bark-bumps don't have a chance to appear. This is the way how I create the bumpmaps:

I think you can better use handmade maps using the Nvidia normal map filter plugin for photoshop or play with the 'Filter --> sketch --> stamp' filter.
The black and white result should be blurred significantly to remove/reduce small scale noise.

I'll post the textures I've been using above here at lower res.
The original I use is 1600x4000 pixels

[rcallicotte]

@TU and Lightning - These look awesome.  This last tree bark is amazing!

[moodflow]

I've been doing the same exact thing.  Glad I'm on the same page as you guys.

This is especially true when it comes to grayscale bumpmaps off of the original 2D colored image.  In photos, the texture doesn't always match where the bumps should be, so I have taken and handpainted my approximation of the bumps on certain textures and created a bump map, and the results are amazing.  

Another thing to try:  When it comes to leaves, replace the leaf image with an alpha image of an entire branch with leaves, and the tree detail goes up yet another notch.  I've even used alpha images of entire trees for leaves, and the results are quite nice if done right.

[lightning]

thanls for your replys
yes standard grey scale does result in spicky artifacts on the bark but you can always just apply a gaussian blur filter to the bitmap just to soften it up abit
anyways am experimenting with real leaves and alpha maps at the moment will show you a few tests tommorow

[mr-miley]

Virtually all the tree models I've posted in the last half year or so have come with bump maps 

[Tangled-Universe]

Virtually all the tree models I've posted in the last half year or so have come with bump maps 

Grayscale diffuse maps?

[mr-miley]

Mostly, though I'm careful not to overexagerate the contrast so you don't get that spikey look. Haven't tried your way yet, I'll have to give it a go. 

Miles