Unity playing around

I've imported my trees into Unity, and fixed the textures - there was a problem with the program recognising the alpha textures I was using in Maya so I recreated my textures as PNGs with transparency and used the defringe tool in Photoshop to get rid of the greyed edges.

My next issue is trying to stop the program from backface culling because my leaves look invisible from beneath. My last 2 tasks are building a basic environment with trees & natural lighting and making a simple VR video of my environment for Google Cardboard view.

Editing vertex normals for lighting

A simple way to edit the vertex normal angle for lighting. note: transfer attributes is under the 'mesh' panel:

Starting Fern

I've started modeling my fern in Maya, it's also a matter of getting the bark right too because my initial base was too simple to mold in zbrush, so I'm extruding parts of it to simulate the bark:

 reference used:

Maple rendering samples

Here is my maple so far, I made a small group of them to give the idea of a scene:

first render without added lights and without grass as polys:

still working on it and need to figure out compositing too :P

Reducing render time

After talking to my lecturer about my rendering, it was suggested I really need to reduce my render time because it is far too long for the scene.

In order to do this it is important to separate 'problem' objects into their own render layers and try rendering them separately, reducing the amount of effects on them also makes a difference. this can be done in the Render settings under the render tab so that you can edit the objects separately and remove them from the main scene (problem bushes have been separated):

My class mate also suggested watching this video for more information:

Solving the lighting problem

This time I rendered my scene with another area light in the background so that the ground would not appear too dark and look closer to the kind of lighting emitted by my background image.

In addition, I found out that when you save the image you need to make sure 'save colour-managed image' selected to make sure the image colour is accurate to that of Maya's render. I also changed the image based lighting from 'raw' to 'sRGB' which gave it more depth of colour:

Now the ground is visible which is good, this render is much closer to what I was trying to achieve! :)

Maya paint effects test and render part 2

I kept at rendering and messing with the lighting, and its getting closer to a desirable scene. I used this tutorial for reference:

First trialing the image based lighting (please ignore environment clipping down the bottom:

Second attempt with more environment light emitted in the image based lighting ticked - also final gathering was made sure to be selected in the render settings. There's definitely more shadow depth here too:

After adding a coloured directional light + changing the shadows slightly:

 This is how the last picture looked in Maya - I think i might add an ambient or area light in my scene because the ground still looks very dark in my saved jpeg version...