Monday, February 14, 2011

More of the stank tree!

For those of you who don't know, the female Ginkgo tree drops pods with a sticky, smelly goop, that gets all over the place, people say they smell vomit and or trash when they notice the stench.  Also rarely the male tree undergoes a metamorphosis and then begins dropping stink pods since it is now a female tree as well, just imagine if humans could do that without surgery, what a wacky world it would be.

Anyways I got a crit over at polycount that my branches looked disconnected and that there wasn't enough medium level detail, too much hyper detail, so I gave it some more medium detail and smoothed out the branches.  I finished up my high res and began retopoing, 2100 hand placed vertices later I had my low.  I definitely need a better way to retopo trees in the future, to have to circle around each branch 8 or more times in order to get the loops in there just took absolutely forever, and then of course figuring in the complicated splits.
Please click for fullview

High Mesh


Baked Low - 4553 Tri's
 
 

 Tree Normal Map at 512 (Original 2048)
Some wires

Once I finished up the low I was excited to bake out my normal maps, after an auto unwrap for testing purposes the results looked ominous, little did I know they would eat up an entire day.  After a proper unwrap and hoping the problems would be fixed, the branches close to the trees were being projected onto the trunk of the tree.  I did not think xNormal had a  ray distance function since I did not see it under the normal map projection settings.  After trying multiple techniques such as splitting up the mesh, baking in maya (which took about 3 hours whereas xNormal takes about 30 seconds) and importing my retopoed into zBrush for a normal bake from there (which destroyed my mesh in some areas) I realized I should search google to see if it had a ray distance function. -- Low and behold IT DOES! It was hidden (at least to me) under the low mesh options which I had never noticed before! So for anyone having a problem such as that just increase it until you get the desired results, you might want to uncheck "closest hit if ray fails" for debugging purposes until everything seems about spot on, then recheck it to make sure all goes well.  A lot of text but hopefully worth the read!

1 comment:

  1. Looks really nice! Once you finish I would try to see how low poly you can get it. A high and low version

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