Mini-Scene: Foliage and stuff...
polycounter lvl 10
Someone pointed out to me that I've never done any organic nature based stuff. So heres my attempt at learning how to make this stuff, crits and all that would be cool 
Tree will probably remain leafless but will have more alpha'd branches, some small camp related props will be added but not much, probably just a small cooking pot and something else.
Foliage, grass, tree, and wood are not textured at the moment, just plain color and AO.
Wires & Sculpts Here
My Ref for the tree Here
Tree will probably remain leafless but will have more alpha'd branches, some small camp related props will be added but not much, probably just a small cooking pot and something else.
Foliage, grass, tree, and wood are not textured at the moment, just plain color and AO.
Wires & Sculpts Here
My Ref for the tree Here
Replies
Only thing that looks off to me is the lower branches of the tree. I'm not sure what kind of tree this would have been, but if it was any sort of deciduous tree, it most likely wouldn't have branches down that low. Other than that, good stuff.
The tree, I really don't like the tree. Anyway crits welcome, gotta improve.
Fire effect is from Epic, not made by me. (lighting by me though
Texture Sheets/Wires Here
I second this! I really like the bottom half of your scene! The texturing IMO is very well done. The rocks look awesome! Texture sheet perhaps?
THIRDED.
Only the bottom half? haha I guess that confirms it, the tree sucks.
Texture Sheets / Wires here
How I did the Tree
I made the basic shape of the tree with zSpheres (image here), made the adaptive skin and then sculpted more shape into it (sculpt image here), I then sculpted it further with the intention of baking detail down to normal maps but scrapped that idea and decided to go with a tiling texture. I did the same for the branches which are baked down to planes.
How I did the Rocks
The rocks were really easy, I started off with a sphere in zBrush and then just sculpted rocky shape things, off the top of my head the main brushes I used were the form, trim dynamic, flatten and standard brushes, (sculpt image here), not much I can add to that I guess.
Texturing was pretty simple, the rock texture in particular has bits of photo source from cgtextures in, the workflow for this went something like: adjust photo source, retrieve edge detail from the sculpted normals using xNormals Normal to Cavity filter which gave me some nice highlights on edges and shadows in crevices, from there on it was just tweaking and adding/taking away stuff.
I figure I should thank adam too, been reading his thread here which has been a good resource for information for some things, I stole his texturing technique for the terrain
Other than that, great work! I'll have to give my rocks a test with that Normal to Cavity map filter, maybe it will help!
*edit* What texture resolution did you use for your rocks/grass? I am particularly impressed with the grass/foliage. Thumbs up!
@Prophecies: I'm just using BLEND_Masked in the materials editor, I'm pretty sure that option doesn't allow for a soft alpha does it? Not too sure. Rock/Foliage texture sheet is 1024x1024, and the alphas on the tree are the smaller branches that are already there.