Slash Pine Tree Brekdown
Made these for a YouTube video going over my vegetation workflow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3svZCWybVcY
Check it out if you want to see the whole process in a bit more detail.
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Scroll for a small bit of the shader breakdown. I hope I can go a bit more in-depth on this at another time.
While I would have spent a lot more time on these, the trees in real life are very unassuming and plain looking, which is often a good thing in video games because you don't really want unique vegetation all over the place sometimes as it repeats a lot.
I am very eager to make a video in the future going over more sculptural trunks and hero assets like what I did for my Darnassus project. Those are fun but very involved and shader / in-engine workload heavy.
Cheers!
I added the pine cones because they were fun to make, but ended up not using them 😂.
The whole atlas is baked in SpeedTree, which allows me very fine controls over all of my masks and color variation / shapes.
It's in my to-do list to record a small breakdown on this bark for YouTube.
As I always say, I love to keep my graphs as simple and clean as possible. 'Cheating' and taking shortcuts wherever I can, and not having a purist mentality that everything has to be done in Designer. This is made 100% from scratch though.
The shader is really powerful for any kind of situation that's thrown at it. For a production project it would be wise to hide some of these features behind switches though. These color adjustments allow for a lot of magic to happen!
The color adjustments can be masked only to the green parts or the branches/brown parts if I'd like to target those specifically. I have a lot of control over every single part of the tree this way.
This gradient feature is useful on other foliage too, not so much this pine. It's nice to have and aligns to the rotation of your foliage automatically.
The shader has an interesting feature to color back-faces separately. This is useful on some foliage (tropical plants) but not so much on others. Again maybe worth hiding behind a switch.
Some of the final renders I thought it would be fun to include.
I could have spent a lot more time on these but was eager to finish the project already 😁.