Foliage

One of main new areas which I chose to look at for this project was foliage. The main foliage I needed were trees, as these feature heavily in my environment. If there is time towards the end of this project, I would also like to create a bush and some grass to line the track, however these are by no means essential.

My first attempts at creating a tree didn’t work very well. The leaves on the tree didn’t seem to fit right, and didn’t make the top of the tree look dense enough to be real. I realised that this was because the leaf planes I had created to flat and uniformly shaped which meant they created an unnaturally shaped tree. To help fix this problem, I looked at a few example of tree models online.

At looking at these I modelled a new leaf plane, which was more curved and unevenly shaped. I also created two smaller variants, each of which has a slightly different layout of leaves on it. The new version of the tree which I created using the improved leaf planes looked much better. The curved leaf planes gave the tree the volume which the first version had been lacking, making it look much nicer.  The only problem I did have was placing the leaf planes in a way which gave the tree a realistic shape.  Because of the way I had modelled the leaf planes, my first attempts at the tree ended up looking too spherical. To counteract this, I took some of the smaller pieces and placed these near perpendicular to the larger leaf planes. After a few attempts placing, repositioning and then adding more of these I finally managed to break up the outline of the tree enough to make it look more natural.

 

The biggest issue I found was getting the leaves on the tree to light correctly. Each leaf plane was only lit on one side, and they were all lit individually rather than in a way that was consistent to each other. Eventually, I was able to find a solution online. The fix involved creating half a sphere and stretching it to cover the whole tree. Next I selected the sphere, followed by the tree. Then by using transfer attributes, you can make the tree light based off of the normals of the sphere. This make the leaves light as a single mass, giving them a more uniform appearance.

Overall I pretty pleased with the tree I created, and was happy with the way it looked when I put it in the UE4 scene. Unfortunately, the tree was the only piece of foliage which I had time to create for this project. If I had more time to work on this project, or was to ever go back to it I would also look at creating some bushes and some grass which would like the edge of the track.