Realistic Leaf tutorial. 3DsMAX 6

clarky003

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The content i have made and used in this thread is freely available to those who wish to use it for following this tutorial.

First of all, to follow this tutorial you will need atleast basic understanding in creating materials and mesh's.

Here are the maps for your leaves, accompanied by its respective bump map. The Tutorial is below.

MAPS:

A.
LEAF0001B.jpg


LEAF0001Bbump.jpg


B.
LEAF0001T.jpg


LEAF0001Tbump.jpg


TUTORIAL:

I'll be focusing on the material and effect.

Boot up MAX and spend as much time as you like creating a rough mesh for your leaf, It's helpful to place the map on a plane and trace its shape with the mesh your making.

Here is mine for reference.

mesh.jpg


Open the materials editor, and select a swatch,

Open the Maps drop down menu, click 'none' next to Diffuse. and open your choice of leaf as a bitmap (not the bumpmap)

1.jpg


Now we need to get rid of the white part of the map with an alpha channel.

Go back to the Maps rollout, by selecting default in the rolldown tab below the material swatches.

default.jpg


click 'none' next to Opacity, and again open the same leaf as a bitmap... rolldown, Open 'Output' and use these settings as a reference.

opacity1.jpg


Create two new points on the graph using the 3rd tool from the left, the selected tool in the image manipulates the position of the points, when your satisfied it looks the same as displayed above go back to the Maps rollout tab.

The White is now invisible and accurate to the outline of the leaf providing 'amount' is set to 100. (If your leaf is going invisible instead, tick 'invert' in 'output')

opacity.jpg


Time to make it shine, and shine properly. This next part is important because we want to restrict the specularity to the leaf part of the map, and not let it appear on the excess edging on your mesh.

click 'none' next to 'specular level' in the list and select your map again.

roll down to Output at the bottom and use this reference till your again satisfied with the appearance of the graph and settings in view.

specbump1.jpg


Apply the bump map near the bottom of the main map rollout (use correct bumpmap texture) play with the bump 'amount' until it looks reasonably realistic to you.

changing the specularity amount should now result in this appearance, and for subsequent render's.

list1.jpg


specbump.jpg


Your done!, now drag that material onto your desired mesh.

goto the modifier's list for your mesh and select unwrap UVW,

and UV map the mesh to fit the texture in the editor. It should look something like this..

UVWleaf.jpg


Finally add some lights, set the scene and you should get something like this.

leaves1024x768.jpg


leaves800x600.jpg


Images are rendered using Vray, Tutorial by Clarky.

Hope thats useful :D
 
thanks all. Its cool if you want to make nice looking bushes or even trees if you have the time.
Do the same with petals to make flowers even, perhaps even add a translucent shader..

Its a lengthy process to get it all looking great but you can make some nice looking foliage for your scenes.
 
yeah thing is foliage models really need to have the leaves as just a thin block with an alpha map or they will take up too many polys.
 
Man, this is the reason I never got into making maps. I got my first taste of making maps with Chex Quest and the Doom map editors. After about a half an hour of exploring and looking around, I ran for my life. I'm such a geek for details that I'd spend years on a frickin' map just to have every leaf on every plant look like this, every thorax on the roaches you can't see would look like that, everything. This is also why I commend the mod community, modelers, programmers, etc., for their efforts, and, why, I'm glad Valve took their time and focused that much attention to detail in HL2. Well worth the wait.

BTW - very nice leaves!
 
hey man nice tutorial . but 3dsmax already comes with a leaf tutorial which is pretty much the same thing.
 
not entirely useful games but a kickass tutorial regardless
 
looks neat, suggest using sss on em to really make it realistic :) appreciate the tutorial, nj
 
clarky u missed a spot on the opacity map and u have a lot of the background bleeding in
 
mindless_moder said:
really ? why not ?
too many polygons involved for regular leaves on tree's in a game environment or pre-rendered environment unless close up to the camera. You'd normally want to fake large numbers of leaves per polygon, or just a single quad/2 tripoly's per leaf in some cases for most realtime tree's

Though if it was for a game where you were an ant, it would work nicely for the environment details. Or even for large leaves on some types of plant, the amount of polygons used would then be a benefit as you could do the whole physical properties thing with it eg: like shown in that crytek engine 2 video.
 
mindless_moder said:
clarky u missed a spot on the opacity map and u have a lot of the background bleeding in

are you talking about the greyscale map? because thats for the bump map only, its not for the opacity channel, the origional colour map is used for defining the opacity..

and I cant see any white holes in those.

Thats the only reason I can imagine for why the background would show through the leaf with the settings ive shown.
 
Red=Opacity leak where a bit of the plane is showing through
Yellow=Texture leak where hte white background has leaked into the mapped area
leaves1024x768copy3pq.jpg

as for the factor of optimisation i thought clarky did it with planes ... didnt really bother to go through the actual tutorial
 
Thats because that pic was rendered before I cleaned the map up for the second render which I posted, but yeh your right, I just posted that anyway.. really no biggy, the maps i posted are the updated ones.
 
WOW! that looks amazing!!! but it would slow down the game to a halt, if you had trees filled with them :eek:
 
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