I would like to improve the overall quality of my trees, and I have an idea of how to do it, conceptually.
When I look at my trees, made up by a trunk, and lots of planes with leaves on, they lack this “understanding” of the overall shape of the tree. Meaning, one plane of leaves has no idea it’s part of a larger sub-collection of leaves, and therefore lies in shadow. The standard leaves shader in Unity do a lot of nice shadowing effects, but it’s simply not…enough.
If you could somehow build a mesh around the tree, which defines the overall shape, and then make this mesh multiply its gained lightning information onto the underlying leave planes (so the mesh itself is not drawn), sort of a pure 2D post effect, then I think I could get my trees to look a lot more thick and three dimensional. And it should clearly only draw on top of the tree it belongs to… :?
This is just a quick sketch of my idea:
I would be ably to create a mesh with little spheres here and there, to difine a blop of leaves, or the like, and I’m sure it would take my trees to the next level, being able to do this.
How would I achieve this, where would I start, is this already doable within the existing technology…etc, etc.
Please, if you have some ideas, speak up
The simplest solution is actually not use the stone but a normal map of the stone. then you can just normalmap / parallax map / relief map the tree and thats it.
naturally assumed that you use lights.
transfering the data from mesh to texture otherwise won’t be simple.
either through rendertexture (only usable for directional light as you can not render 50 shape meshes to get 50 different informations) or other means of vertex shader to pixel shader data transfers which likely would require Shader Model 3 enforcements
I know that And nice effects for sure.
I have played around a lot. And I have even gotten some rather decent results. But I have not nearly achieved the desired result. It’s all too soft and gentle. I lack a way of making a little blop of leaves stand out, with lights on top, and darkness on the buttom. Making the overall shape of the tree a lot more defined and clear.
Like this tree:
Look at how it almosty have a contained surface of blops (even though I’m sure there’s a lot of better references of my thoughts out there). Like it’s no more individual leaves, but just a shape. This kind of thickness/3d’ness, I would not be able to achieve with that shader. Not enough definition.
Dreamora> Yeah…that might be it. Creating a new UV-set. Making a shape, projecting its normals on the leave planes, using this UV-set.
How would you make a shader, with a normal-map that uses a secondary UV-set? Like lightning maps, just with normal maps instead… Doable?
