Foliage & Particle Systems

 12/05/21 - Week 32

 To finish this project, I finally added the foliage and particle systems planned. 

For the foliage, I took the approach that I am already comfortable with, this includes drawing out the foliage on photoshop and then creating a normal map using the 3D functions on photoshop. I then took these onto its own plane each to prepare these for engine. I think if I had more time I would have liked to try a sculpting approach to the foliage but I was worried that I wouldn't be able to create good looking foliage in time, in hindsight I think it would have been very beneficial to the scene as I feel the foliage would have just looked more professional. However, the photoshop method does look very stylised so I think for this project it doesn't matter overly much as it somewhat blends in.

To put these into engine, I used the foliage tool, I haven't used this before but with a few bits of troubleshooting with the anchor points I eventually figured out how to place all my foliage. This sped things up a lot and the result looked much like how I imagined it. The only thing I was a bit disappointed with the ivy as I think that it doesn't look as good as the grass and clovers, though I am pretty sure this is just down to my foliage drawing skill.

I then manually placed the leaves and flowers as these were specific to some areas.

As you can see in this screenshot, there are some effects that have been applied to the foliage. This really made the foliage come to life.

I firstly made the material "2-sided foliage" instead of default lit and then added a brighter green to my base colour through the add function and plugged this into subsurface colour. This creates the translucent, halo effect that you can see mostly in the ivy and leaves that are being hit by the directional light. This makes the foliage a lot more realistic and also more interesting and aesthetically pleasing in my opinion.

I also wanted to add some wind that would effect the foliage. This also turned out to be quite a simple effect that was mainly created by the simpleGrassWind node, controlled by a couple of parameters for the speed and intensity. It effects both the base colour and normal by using the multiply function.

I didn't have too many issues here, surprisingly, and I was happy with the outcome I had produced for the foliage since it livened up the scene a lot more.

Another way I wanted to liven up the scene was through the use of particle systems, initially I wanted some dust and also some flames on the candle sticks. Unfortunately, though I tried a lot of things I couldn't get the flames to be emissive so I had to eventually give up here. I am not sure why this is but it just continuously looked dull. Overall though, I don't think the scene suffered too much without them.

For the dust effects, I followed a tutorial to figure out the correct settings. It was an average particle creation as it just included the use of colour over life to control the visibility over time and orbit to make it move a little bit. I also set the collision to kill when touching an object/other particle. This was mainly because I thought it would be more efficient though I did end up having to use 2 different particle emitters in engine because of this so I am unsure if it would have been better or not.

Here is the finished result. I'm quite happy with it and I think that the foliage and particle effects has made the scene look a lot more professional and interesting to be in the environment. As previously mentioned, there is a couple things I would have liked to change about the design of the foliage and I would have really liked to get the flames in but due to lack of time this has meant a slight drop in polish.