Mushrooms Prop
Hello all - i've started playing around with the whole sculpting and baking shebang, and below are effects of that (used to do more of a traditional low-poly, but got out of the loop for few years and catching up now 
Comments and critique would be mostly welcomed. It's a finished piece at this stage and i'll try to do better next time (put more polys where it really show, carefully model low poly so it bakes better and cleaner and so on...)
At the moment the whole thing is slightly above 5k triangles, 2k maps for mushroom (diff, normal and emissive) and 1k for base (normal, spec+gloss, diffuse)
Rendered in marmoset with skylight and 3 lights setup. I couldn't get alphas to work correctly so had to leave them out (had some spider webs coming down from the mushroom hats, but alpha blend wouldn't z-sort them correctly, alpha-test looked crap, and alpha-to-coverage even worse) - any ideas??
Thanks!
m.
maps
Comments and critique would be mostly welcomed. It's a finished piece at this stage and i'll try to do better next time
(put more polys where it really show, carefully model low poly so it bakes better and cleaner and so on...)At the moment the whole thing is slightly above 5k triangles, 2k maps for mushroom (diff, normal and emissive) and 1k for base (normal, spec+gloss, diffuse)
Rendered in marmoset with skylight and 3 lights setup. I couldn't get alphas to work correctly so had to leave them out (had some spider webs coming down from the mushroom hats, but alpha blend wouldn't z-sort them correctly, alpha-test looked crap, and alpha-to-coverage even worse) - any ideas??
Thanks!
m.
maps
Replies
I threw out all "this universe" logic once I saw bioluminescent spore things.
cube -> while i absolutely agree with you - yeah - it all kinda slipped into fantasy realm so i wasnt too concerned about mycelium networks and not growing on rocks
jadeeyepanda -> there you go
nauz -> cheers man but at thisstage environment would be a loong way away to be honest... maybe one day
sybrix -> thanks! - my worflow at this stage is very messy - there's a lot of back and forth but the gist of it would be: low poly in max, sculpt in zbrush, then back in max for retopology and uv'ing -> baking in xnormals (normals, cavity, ao and curvature - i find this last map very handy for highlighting convex edges and darkening concave ones) then i usually throw the whole lot into photoshop and start painting, i also have body paint handy for fixing seams and creating seamless masks (i also fling in all baked maps one by one and overpaint any bugs - with this one there was quite amount of em as my low poly was crap)
then i usually finish it off with a bit of pattern/noise - in this case some organic noise visible mostly in the stalks' grooves (again - i just throw tileable texture over the whole thing, fix seams between UV chunks in bodypaint and then mask it in bodypaint - then back to photoshop - level out and voila!
yeah - throw in a bit of handplane normal maps recalculation from object-space to tangent
and coat3d auto-retopology (for rock on the base)
cheers
f.