Foliage VFX: Week 1 Wednesday

On wednesday I began constructing all of the foliage that would be in the scene, starting with the alphas and ending with the solid/opaque foliage.

To avoid using too much texture space, I specifically modelled a flat leaf for texturing, then made several reference versions with a ffd modifier stacked onto their individual unique shelves:

I made sure that each alpha was bent slightly or overlapped so that it could be visible from all angles and made sure that the normals were pointing upwards to avoid any bad lighting angles. In the future, if I wanted to be particularly cheap with my budget, I would consider then projecting these alphas onto an even lower poly plane. In other circumstances I would also consider adding normal maps, but the concept was fairly cell shaded and flat, so I decided to utilise that texture space for something else instead.

After merging everything together, I made sure everything was moved to the centre of the grid ready to be exported to UE4, with light maps in place.