Lance test + displacement

Here is the beginning of my lancewood as a render but I need to get the displacement map sorted because my polycount is way too high :( I found out that the leaves on the lancewood need their alphas saved as a targa or the plane shows the colour up during the render:

Next step is trying to apply a displacement map to my based model in Maya to place it over a low poly version:

Using GoZ with lancewood

I had some trouble exporting with Goz initially because Zbrush refused to find the application location but I used this link to help and reinstalled some of the goz plugins and then it started working:

Also need to put foliage on the lancewood, I have my leaf alpha and I need a bark texture for the tree. I'm looking at this forum for Maya because it has some interesting points on how to make realistic foliage: link

This will include editing my vertex normals on the tree foliage so that they will look less like planes -bending normals  - this helps to light them at a different angle and makes them look more leaf like, I also have to make the backface for the textures manually so that they don't get blacked out.

Textured tree

the tree I was working on ended up being very textured I might not use it in my final composition but I'll try running it through GoZ and baking it on to my Maya model:

Making leaves

I went around the garden at home and photographed different leaves for texturing on my varieties of tree, I haven't included the alphas of them here but I will probably use them:

My inspiration for the project : The Forest

Just a reiteration of my main objectives from my formative assessment PDF.

The Forest is made using Unity 4 and more recently Unity 5 as announced. It's terrain is built in Unity using the programs features along with a series of Unity plug-ins.

I am not following the same pipeline as the developers of this game because I really wanted to try developing my skills more using Maya and Zbrush to achieve a similar effect, at least with the base model and texture of the trees.

Here is an article which discusses the development of the game in more detail

Mesh issues

Initially i was having problems bringing my obj Maya mesh into zbrush, as the branches would refuse to connect their mesh to the trunk object. This required messing around with the move topology tool and zremshing the object before using Dynamesh.
If I tried using dynamesh before moving the objects around the mesh would still refuse to stick and I was contemplating remaking the tree base with spheres :P, but ended up getting it to weld:

I'm also using the pine tree on the left as a basic reference for now.

Some texturing techniques and tips

I consulted my animator friend about some ways to go about making nice textures and file managing in Maya and learned a few new things that I wasn't aware of:

Firstly a useful tool is the file path editor (under general editors). This quickly helps to manage missing files and source images that are texturing your model, particularly if you are working across computers and the file paths change around a bit:

Secondly I learned that my leaves were lacking a bit of vibrancy because I want using an alpha image for my transparency. The alpha will assist in making the opacity of the leaves stronger than just using a base image. I had to take the image into Photoshop and create an alpha like so:

In addition for the colour of the leaves he suggested I change the background from white to a similar green to the leaves, This is so the grey haze around the leaves will no longer be visible:

The texture can then be place on the object through the hyper shade or attribute editor. However it's important to remember to break the connection between colour and transparency so that they don't try to use the same file path. colour should be linked to the green leaf and transparency should be linked to the alpha picture. The result looks more lively than my initial texture:

Finally I was also advised that it's common in industry to use the mia mental ray x pass node to texture objects with as it gives a better overall texture, so in future I will try to use this (can be created in the hyper shade editor):

Nicer render: