This is a spicebush modeled for North American scenes in Darkest of Days. The goal was to make a medium-poly bush that would react in a physically-dynamic way from NPC collision a la Crysis bushes. It’s about 400 polys, uses 3 512 textures and one 256 lightmap. The source art was 1024 res for all 4 maps.
Workflow:
- I modeled a simple low-poly leaf using Sub-Ds.
- I took the leaf into Mudbox and scultped out some detail.
- Using XNormal, I baked a normal map from Level 7 in Mudbox down to Level 2 so I could compose a set of leaves with a reasonable poly count in modo.
- I converted the baked normal map into a heightmap. This needed to be done due to limitations for rendering normals in modo 201.
- I exported out the Level 2 leaf from Mudbox and imported into modo.
- In modo, I baked a local AO map for the single leaf.
- I composed a set of leaves into a few branch configurations.
- I rendered several passes of the leaves in modo: one with the local AO, one with AO for the whole leaf group, one for the height map, and one for the whole leaf group normals.
- I converted the leaf group height map into a normal map using CrazyBump and overlaid it on top of the whole leaf group normal map in Photoshop.
- I composited the local AO with the whole leaf group AO. At this point, I had a normal map and a start at a diffuse map. I made sure to dynamically link all source images in Photoshop, so that they could be changed later if need be, and easily tweaked.
- I went into modo and modeled a bush from reference, keeping in mind the bush needed to be physically-dynamic with vertex weights mapped cylindrically from the origin.
- Through some juggling between Maya and modo, I created a second UV channel, baked the lightmap for the bush in modo, then exported the bush from Maya with 2 UV channels.
- I created diffuse and spec detail from soybean rust, skin, and leaves.
- I hand-painted yellow-green detail on the leaves in the diffuse.