From the Vue workshop I did last year. Lots of comping in this one. My singing teacher Rebekah mentioned that we are all ‘working on the handicap’ (golfer talk). I guess that’s a good way to think.

Fooling around with hyperterrains. And endlessly tweaking the trees.

I’m reviewing the workshop I did with Scott Brisbane last year, before the course with Andres Rodriguez starts next week. I thought this render came out rather well. Geo compliments of Scott.

I had a lot of trouble rendering this. Network rendering wasn’t working very well, not sure why, so I ended up doing a lower res version than I really wanted on a single machine.

I’m looking forward to starting my new course in a couple of weeks. I’ll probably bomb out though, probably due to work pressure. Not sure that I’m really up to the demands either, so ‘work pressure’ is probably just an excuse. Talk about conflicted.

Solved the problem of the dead grass, and have redone this image with some greener grass and a different format.

These TPF maples use billboards, but there are three variations of the leaf image so there isn’t so much obvious repetition. There is still a bit so need to use carefully.

So here’s a quick comp – significant improvement on any of the individual shots. I’m sure if I spent a bit more time on it it would be quite good.

The Summer Cherry Tree has about 150,000 polys, but the leaves are sort of billboards – not facing camera but images mapped to planes that don’t look so good side on but also don’t look good if they’re all lined up the same so that the repetition is obvious. I’ve rotated the tree to minimise the problem here, but it is a constraint. I’ve seen some trees with billboards look OK by using several different billboards, but like tiled textures one needs to be careful.

Perhaps I should explore the approach of rendering several different views and compositing the leaves to get a good result. When I did the Vue workshop with Scott Brisbane he usually used that approach (with clouds) to get the result he wanted. No need to be constrained by what Vue can offer in a single image. Must give it a go.

Spending a bit of time going through my plant library, most of which come by default with Vue Infinite. The Plant Factory has some content as well.

This llittle scene has some plum trees and various types of grass. The plum is a fairly low-poly asset, of the old SolidGrowth type. The leaves look pretty  bad up close but on a distant hillside they’re not so bad.

I think I’ve got a fair grip on The Plant Factory now.  Good thing too as I’m back at work next week and won’t have much time to spend learning it. I’d like to be able to use it for my upcoming workshop. Not sure how that is going to work out, as it coincides with the start of semester. I’m not too optimistic actually, I think I’m looking for too much. Attendees are probably expected to bring their own inspiration, which I sorely lack.

I’ve worked out how to do a bit of sculpting on the trunk of the tree. GoZ is meant to work with The Plant Factory but it doesn’t (for me). However there is another process that does seem to work, and creates the possibility of an interesting hero tree for an environment. This example was only a couple of minutes work, but I’m sure if I spend a bit of time on it I can come up with a pretty good result. Happy. Sort of.