Need Help with Tree Leaves

[Mr Maison]

I want to release these willows and more trees already but I'm not happy with the way the leaves are coming out in game. I even put a dark green color overlay on them in Photoshop and I still get the following fringe effect. How do we get deep color of leaves like the game have?

Once I get over this mystery, I can move on to make more trees.

 

[Shroomblaze]

You have to change the levels or you can change the Brightness.... I usually drop the brightness down by like 150 just to start seeing the color I want.. then after that you can start testing in game with different brightness to see what looks better.

also are you getting the white haze around the edges?

 

[Mr Maison]

also are you getting the white haze around the edges?

Yeah, that's my main issue. Don't know how to get rid of the fringe.

This tree is using the same texture in a regular test render I did a while back. It's the look I'm going for.

 

[Shroomblaze]

Yeah, that's my main issue. Don't know how to get rid of the fringe.

This tree is using the same texture in a regular test render. It's the look I'm going for.

Read the green background post on this website... It will tell you how to remove the white edges...

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/10302/messy-alpha-problem-white-around-edges.html

 

[Shroomblaze]

Btw looking good, How many Tri's is that? are you using geometry for all the branches?

 

[Mr Maison]

Thanks for the link. Gonna do some reading....

 

[Shroomblaze]

Mr Maison, Also after you do a Solidify B, make sure to delete all the excess stuff it generates, but leave a small border around your main image for the alpha channel to read. That way you keep the texture file down too.

 

[Mr Maison]

Btw looking good, How many Tri's is that? are you using geometry for all the branches?

Oh No....that tree cannot get into the game. It's made for Arch Viz so I didn't have to worry so much about poly count. The tree in the first 2 images is a very dumbed down version I made as simple as I can go. I want to scale up the detail little by little to see how far I can go. Xfrog can be a bitch when it comes to poly count control. What I can do though is fake some of the upper branches via png to get that effect.

Thanks.

 

[Shroomblaze]

I want to scale up the detail little by little to see how far I can go. Xfrog can be a bitch when it comes to poly count control.

I was looking at a bunch of tree programs recently, But they all seem to think low poly count is like 1000-2000 tris.... How is Xfrog? what kind of size trees can you make in terms of low poly counts?

 

[Mr Maison]

I was looking at a bunch of tree programs recently, But they all seem to think low poly count is like 1000-2000 tris.... How is Xfrog? what kind of size trees can you make in terms of low poly counts?

It have a slider at the bottom where you can control the LOD of the trees. It's a very interesting little program. There's a 30 day demo and it's usually on sale a lot during the year wth free samples you can reverse engineer. You can actually make things beyond trees in this thing as it's a procedural organic modeler. Here's a link http://xfrog.com/

Once you get the hang of the controls, you can make trees, shrubs and flowers as detailed or simple as you like. The only downside I would say is the limited community interaction around it. Don' let the fact it hasn't changed since 2005 fool you though. It's a very popular tree maker used also in hollywood.

If you decide to try it, I can help you get started. I'm using the 3.5 standalone version.

 

[Mr Maison]

Thanks for that link Shroomblaze!! Looking better with the solidify filter method. Still some more tweaking to go.

 

[Mr Maison]

Mr Maison, Also after you do a Solidify B, make sure to delete all the excess stuff it generates, but leave a small border around your main image for the alpha channel to read. That way you keep the texture file down too.

When you say the excess stuff, what am I looking for exactly?

This is with color overlay I had on it before which results in the image above

This is without the overlay effect but I can see the effect of solidify

 

[Shroomblaze]

I'm talking about trimming the excess pixel data that solidify b gives you. Usually I will turn on the wire frame layer and use the polygon selection tool to go around a few pixels just outside the edge of the wire frame and delete the outer particles that will never be seen an does not need to be included in the texture file. Another method is to Ctrl click your layer which is actually the better method and what I normally do and then I will do a selection expand by 2 or 3 pixels and the inverse the selection and delete the extra material. All those extra colored pixels do is generate a bigger texture size cause more load time for the game. This is just a rough idea of what I mean, I would probably go a lot closer than this to the edge of the uvwmapping.

By doing this I was able to shave off some extra kb....
Before - 1.142mb
After - 1.131mb

Now this may seem like a small difference, but sometimes when you have a solidify b that takes up the whole diffuse texture space will cause a lot of extra kb you don't need... You usually find this with stuff that has a lot of colors in it. You have a simple green leaf so it's not generating that much data. Sometimes I am able to trim a few hundred kb off my images.

For Example with my hot air balloon I'm working on you can see how much Kb I am able to shave off the image. You can't really see the solidify effect on the right side, but it is there. This is also a tiny example, but you can see that over the course of many models you do that kb will add up to mbs of data that the game doesn't need to load.

 

[Mr Maison]

Ok I understand now. Yea, every little bit counts. Thanks.

I am redesigning the willow to be a little fuller now that I know how to deal with the textures. I will post soon.