Let's make some Foliage! - Game Art Breakdown

[Music] welcome back to the stylized station breakdown where we have talented artists take over the channel for the day and share cool workflows industry insights and some rare tips and tricks today i'm super happy to welcome the very talented katya who's going to give us a 40 minute long master class on foliage creation whether it's grass flowers and any types of vegetation every single budding environment artist needs to learn this get it speaking of foliage if you want to become a true master of grass foliage and other 3d vegetation check out my brand new environment art course for beginners called the environment artist survival kit where you're going to learn everything from making flowing grass to fluffy trees and sweeping landscapes all 13 hours of content are only 49 forever so i'll leave a link in the description if you want to check out the course so put on your favorite gardening gloves sit back relax and enjoy the video hey everyone my name is katia levon i'm a french environment artist building new in this video we are going to talk about how i create vegetation and my process using substance designer and autodesk in order to achieve this scene on annoying and joint 4. so let's dive in first of all let's see some references that i've used i'm currently using the software puree that i recommend because it's free and super useful so i wanted to create a deep forest such as the ones in japan i aimed for yumi that musia with some guttery passing through the deals a large rotation and also round covered with mouse so for the atmosphere i went by the game hope as my main reference due to the curls and the lighting it got some blue and green shades with some little touch of warmer colors for the lush meditation i went by the amazing concepts of lorenzo lanfranconi the way he translates nature in his concepts with his graphic style was quite an inspiration thanks to his color scale and his composition my main references about stella star were from the jose marti chimi maleki i love how he represents his textures it's smooth and he got low frequencies by that i mean it's not that much noisy and also the colorimetry matches what i wanted for the scene for the global composition i was of course inspired by ghibli and their way to transfer rarity to a magical and mysterious world that's it for the references of my artistic direction but of course i went by plenty of the images for each rant that they created for example i'll show you free plans that they've made and the references that are used so for the water led i like to get free photos of the plants in addition to a floral dissection in order to better understand how it's made but also some pictures of traditional heart in order to get the essence of how people can see them so as you can see the plant is composed of mostly three to four parts which are two to three rings of petals and the stamens the stamens which are the little yellow hair but the plant is way more complex than that but for master style i went by this composition for recreating waterlily for the fair as another example i would decompose the plan by only the leaf plate so as you can see in this picture there's a lot of more that compose this plant for the leaf blade it's composed of little leaves composed themselves by overlit leaves to simplify so for my leaf blade i went by just leaves around the road in order to reduce the noise another example is my flower based on the concepts of florence woodley as you can see this is traditional watercolors concepts made for the game can i bridge your spirits i like how he painted his vegetation it got a magical touch so for my plant i went by this flower but i simplified it by getting rid of all the little variations of colors and the noise and i tried to get only gradients of the colors of the concept because in games vegetation is often seen from far away so we can sometimes prefer to reduce the frequencies and that is for the references of my vegetation now i'll show you how i create a foliage class in substance designer and i'll give you some tips to begin with a definition in game art a texture atlas also called the sprite sheet or an image sprite is an image containing multiple smaller image usually packed together to reduce overall dimensions in my case it will be about merging different parts of my plants so i created my atlas with substance designer however there are plenty of ways to create a foliage layers such as modeling them in 3d software like zbrush or blender and after you've got to bake them in order to get this texture but those are destructive way of doing it because if you want to change a little bit the shape of one e for the number of petals you've got to export and import your high poly models and make them again another way is 3d software such as photoshop or any other drawing soft you can pack your class but you get to make the over textures information from scratch such as the ambient occlusion map the normal map and so on and another way is photo scan which is really interesting but we require a more complex treatment to achieve a status style so that's why i wanted to do mine on a substance designer because of its practicity of free turret and the parameters that allow me to change quickly every part of my class before showing you how to make a net glass i'll show you how i make a leaf because my main addresses are composed by multiple variations of this graph here's who will create most of my use i'll discontract this graph and explain each part of it so for the first part he's a combination of nodes that allows me to get to the main shape of my leaf based on a curve that i can control with points so it's composed of a gradient linear one and a transformation tree and a curve who's going to blend i'm using the transformation 2d here and not the rotation already included in the gradient linear 1 because i will use this gradient in over part of my graphs i'm using the subtract blending mode which will subtract the foreground input which is a transformation 2d from the curve that i've made so i get this blurry shape which i will put in instagram scan in order to get a way to remap the contrast and the brightness of it and i'll put this result in a cell transom grayscale in order to put it in the middle of the mod by moving the axis x and after i'm using a mirror gray scale and yeah you've got your first leaf but what's really powerful in this combination of node is that just by moving the point of your curve you can change the shape of your leaves so you can get various shapes of leaves just with this combination that's it for the first part of my graph with this shape of we can get a little bit further by adding a tip and some variations to it so for a tip at the bottom of the shape we need a directional warp we for intensity input a mix of node composed by a gradient here now three a curve and another combination of notes which are going to be the mask for the curve so for the background input of my blend i'll just need to the gradient cleaner free with a curve with this kind of pen in order to reduce it like so and for the mask of this girl i need this kind of rigid bell with a transformation 2d but yeah i'd like to show you how i make this result because i will use it another part of my graph in order to obtain this result i will show you this combination of nodes so to obtain this shape i need more precisely a thorn with a scale of two and this is going into a transformation 2d with an offset on the y-axis i need to reuse my graduating now 3 and my grandchildren one used previously here in order to get this result so my gradually now 3 is going here on the curve with this kind of band and my grand antenna well one is just going here into this plane with the blending mode multiply and opacity to 0.5 so i get this result which is going into the background of this band so this result will be used in other parts of my graph but for the mask of my uh my pointy thing here i'll use a transformation 2d with a rotation to 180 degrees thanks to the help of transformation 2d just by clicking here i'll put my rotated shape in a level in order to reduce the brightness of the top of my shape i've got the mask for my blend and this blend is on multiply blending mode and this is going into the intensity input of my directional wall so my directional warp has 90 degrees more angle in with a value of 20 to as you like if you want something more pointy you just have to move the value and finally for the variations of 30th in order to get something more organic i'll use a multi-directional warp gray skirt with a directional warp as input and for the intensity input i'll use the gaussian noise multiplied by the inverted gradient linear 3 so that the center is not affected and thus keep the tip intact so i've got this result with an opacity at 0.725 and this is going into my multi-directional warp i got these parameters but it's up to you you can have something more chaotic by changing the different modes directions and the density after seeing how to make the shape of the leaf we are going to see how to make some veins a correction border mask and also some inner shape variations so for the veins i'm actually using a tyrandel but you can use a stripes note also you just have to put the shift value to zero and move the value of the width and the number of stripes so you get kinda the same thing so for the tie random my parameters are four for the y amount i've got a split mode unknown and i'll put my random mix size to 0 and you can also move a little bit the amount of intensities this is a kind of the first path to my veins i need something more the symmetric so i'll use a directional warp with a for intensity input band composed by two values of uh which is basically two uniform color black and white you just have to press the d key down to pack them together so i got something like that and i need to bend it with another mask and i will use this mask that i've used before not the rotating one because with this kind of brightness the lens will be bent as i would like them to and as you can see if i can if i'm moving a transformation 2d the lens will be changing so i've got my first draft of my veins but this is a little bit rough so we're going to need some transformations in order to get to this result first i need to invert it and make a mask for getting rid of the unwanting lines i'll use this time the mask that i've used for the tip of the leaf but with some of the nodes so i'll use a blend multiplying my mask with my first draft of my veins in order to remove the border lines and i will need another mask with gradient for the rest of the lines so i'll use a previous mask inverted change it by the curve in order to get a way to control the gradient that will be removing the external parts of my veins and finally the last mask for just getting the vein inside of the shape of my leaf is made by getting a broad shape of my last shape of my leaf so i'll use a blur and make a curve and blend it with a multiply mode in order just to get these veins so for the correction border mask i'll be back to my first draft of my veins which is here and i'll put a result in a distance invert it and buried i'll put this in the intensity input of the directional warp with the leaf shape that i've made from the multi-directional warp grayscale so with this result i'll put this in a blur which is going into a bevel with a distance of 0.02 and a smoothing value around two and this is going into the background of blend and for the foreground of the blend i'll invert the gray scale of my blur it in transformation 2d and make like a uniform scale by pressing down ctrl shift and moving this just in order to get rid of the unwanted blurry shape and i get this nice smooth border for my leaf next for inner shape variations i'll use a crystal 2 and transformation 2d with a rotation to 90 degrees and a little bit of scaling and this is going into a directional warp with intensity input the same mask that i've used for the directional warp of my events so this one so i get the same thing for consistency so i'll put this result into a blur and after i will put it into autoloaders and that's it for now for the inner shapes variations now there will be like two to three phases for merging all of this in our if i'll use the previous result of my bro hq grayscale and put it in a blend with a value of 0.5 in opacity and with the background input i will use an instagram range from the inverted scale of the gradient linear free so i get this result and i'll put this in another blend with multiplying blending mode we've for foreground inverted grayscale from regards and linear free so i get this result and you can move it as you like so this is going into another blend with the last part of my leaf which is from the correction border mask so i get this result and it's a multiply bending mode and this is going into a curve to readjust the brightness of it so now i'll take my inner shapes variations what i've made here with the crystal tube i'll make a blend with the curve so i get this result and i've got a blending mode overlay and for the opacity i've got 0.4 but you can move it as you like next part i need to make a mid rib for this leaf so for this part i need a shape with a square as for the pattern and i'll move the sliders of the x and y for getting like a thin rectangle i'll use the transformation 2d for having something endear parameter for the scale of this shape so i'll put this result into a bro hq grayscale with an intensity around tube and this is going into a trapezoid transform grayscale with no tiling mode to make it more triangular by switching these parameters i'll put this result in a curve in order to get another shape like so and i'll multiply a gradient to my mid-rib thanks to a gradient linear one rotated of 180 degrees with a blend at 0.5 opacity i'll put my mid-rib in a directional wall just from some variations with intensity input the gaussian noise that i've used before and this is it i've got my final rib now i'll get back to the veins i'd like to get some varies and not sticks like the mid-rib for the veins because in my opinion it will be too much noisy for a stellar style so i'll put my mid-rib in a instagram scan to make it brighter and after in a blend with the veins that i've made before as you can see here the blend has a max blending mode in order to keep the maximum values between my two inputs i'll put this result in a curve in order to register brightness of the veins as you can see and i'll insert it because as i've said earlier i want some valleys and not some thick veins and with this result i'm going to put it in a blur with an intensity around two and this result is going a slow progress curve and that's it for my veins so for now we are near from the end of the finite leaf so i'm back to the last leaf that i've made with the inner shapes variations from here and i'll multiply it with the valleys of veins what i've made here and i'll put this result into another blend in order to add my mid rib with the max lighten blending mode the rib from the directional warp that we made here i'll put this result into another blend with an overlay blending mode but this time for the foreground input a gradient linear one that we've got here and with an opacity to 0.5 in order to have something smoother and i'll connect this result to a curve for getting the right brightness for my leaf and i can finally put this into a directional warp if i want some variations and this is the final result of my leaf while the texturing i'm using at first the gradient color and after a combination of nodes for creating more variations into the gradient i'll use the technique founded from the work of jimmy maraki he's using some bitmaps map from alpha found on internet and i've made mine on photoshop as well and i'll import them after in my substance swipe so with those speed maps i'm going to splatter and blur them with some various color for obtaining like an abstract texture i'm playing with the opacity from each plane till i get something i like and i can finally merge my first gradient to this texture for having like a stylus texturing with different touch of color and that's it for the texturing part so we've seen how to make a leaf with this graph and thanks to the different nodes that i've showed you you can make a lot of different sleeve and that's basically what i've done for all my atlases i'd like to make two four to six different leaves and i'll merge them all in one texture with the help of a safe transform grayscale all thanks to uh transformation 2d so as you can see this is like the same first graph that i'll show you but with some transformation so here's basically the first leaf that i've made for example for the leaf blade of the fern i'll use a tire simpler in order to make one part and a mirror grayscale and i'll make a rib here and all my trim with the iplant node and as another example for the clother i've used a different way to create my wreath because i'd like to try something new so basically i've used the shape and the directional warp in order to make like a heart shape and yeah i would use splatter circular in order to make the shape of it and make some variations with the cushion noise so here it is i'll blend all of my leaves that i've made as i said earlier and i've got my atlassians here and i'll make the coral as i said up with the jimmy maraki technique and yeah this is how i make my atlases next after i've got my fourier class from substance designer i'm going on the softer waterless maya but you can choose blender or another 3d soft as you like so i'll create a plane where i will put my textures on i just carried it to two so i will create like a new material uh like a long bear and i'll just put my color map and my transparency map into this so i'll go here and i put a file i will search my file in my documents so we go this one and i'll go back here and i will choose the transparency map 2 which is going to be here so here's i've got my plan with my foliage class having the transparency for the shadow in maya you've got to go to renderer panels and go to the viewport 2.0 and check this box transparent shadow so now it's time for cutting we are going to create each mesh for each part of the plant and the shortcut for multi-car tool is ctrl shift x as you can see here i've got my uh multicode2 and i'll be sure to get as few as possible of transparency for optimization so we switch to the top view mode i just go here and focus on this one so i will go with this plant which is the leaf blade of the fern so i just get here here and i will select this face and i will extract it you can do so this combination which is shift and right click and you just have to extract your face i've got this one so here's my first plane with the first sleeve i'll check if preserve uv's mode is checked ejector in order to not deform my textures on my plane so if it's checked my texture will be not deformed if i move the edges around it if it's unchecked sorry as you can see it's stretching my texture so we don't want this so now we remove a little bit of transparency by switching to the top view mode and moving my vertexes like so it's nice okay and of course i will add some edges along the plane because uh i'll do some transformations after like a burn or some displacement so i'll use the tool insert edge loop which is a to the mesh tools panel which is here i check this one i can choose the number of edge groups six is fine so i'll just click here drag and click here and i also want to put one edges in the middle so i just go with my vertica tool and i'll go here like in the middle so i will again switch to the top view mode in order to move my vertexes and not interfere with the with the textures so i will merge the vertices to the center i just move it a little bit and yeah you kind of have to do it for each brand that you create after i've got the excess of transparency removed i got my first leaf blade for my friend so i'll do this combination of transformation for the mesh which are center pivot because as we can see it's here so it will center here and there it's history because there are a lot of things that i've done with this mesh so i just delete it and i'll french transom it so this is nice it's good to go after i got my plants with my plants i'm going to do the vertex painting for the windy influence the paint retracts tool is found in the mesh display panel and you can also create some shortcuts by pressing down control shift and click on the tool that you want i usually get one channel of rgb for the wind influence and save the universe for more information so you can choose the green the red or the blue one for the demonstration i'll go with rgb which is white so you don't want like a perfect gradient all along the plane because each plant reacts differently with wind i used to do this but i realized with time that you got to test and retreat if needed of course so i'm going to smooth it just a little bit so yeah this is nice in order to see the textures of a plane again and not the vertex painting you go to go to match display and toggle the sprinkler attribute and after he says i'll do some composition of plants like two to five versions for diversity i will use the ban and of course moving my vertexes but i will always check if i don't interfere with the textures by moving my pawns so for now i'll just make my phone with this process another checkpoint to see is the vertex normal the vertex normals are invisible lines pointing out of a 3d model surface at each vertex so here is a vertex normal for this vertex the engine compares these normals again against the light's direction if the light is directly facing or normal the surface is brightest there when a normal is facing away from the light the surface doesn't get lead by it so if i'm taking my normals down by doing so as you can see my plant won't be lit by the light in order to show the vertex normal i go by polygon and vertex normal and this is kind of what we want for the vertex normal but we can go a little bit further and for that i'll use the technique from madbilici which is making a mesh with the shape of your plant in order to attribute the vertex normal data of this mesh on your plant so here we go i'll just make a cube and put it in the middle of my plant scale it a little bit and smooth it i'll go about this number of tuition i'll sketch a little bit again in order to cover the entire part of my plans and right after that i'm going to use the transfer attributes tool and i'll transfer my vertex position so i'll take my plant and my sphere so the vertex transfer attribute position is here we are going to use vertex vertex position and the vertex normal but for now we are going by this so i'll check this on and check this off and i'll reply and as you can see my mesh is going to take the shape of my plant so this is kind of what we want we're going to do a center position delete history and free transfer and i scale it a little bit my mesh always smooth it again and i will use the scripting mode of maya by smoothing it so this is kind of what we want for the vertex normal attribution so this mesh has this information for the vertex normal and i will put the tributes of my mesh to my plants so i'll take my mesh and next my plant and i'll check this on and check this off and yeah that's it my mesh of plant has the same vertex position of this mesh so i'm going to delete this one um i'll talk about the vertex painting and yeah that's it you've got your first mesh ready to export for your engine thanks for watching i hope that will help i want to especially thank tommaso smith for giving me the opportunity to make this video and if you want to follow my work here's some of my information i've got a project coming soon i'll see you around and i wish you good luck

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 333,769

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, blender (software), blender 3d, blender tutorials, blender grass tutorial, blender fluid tutorial, blender animation tutorial, blender 3d animation tutorial, blender fluid physics tutorial, tutorials, tutorial (media genre), blender3d, blender render, beginner tutorial, blender water material, blender guru, modeling tutorial, blender online, blender curves, vfx tutorial, 3d modeling tutorial

Id: eZutHZDV0yU

Length: 38min 7sec (2287 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021