Foliage

Been working on the foliage for outside the bank. I decided to go for evergreen plants and shrubs as these are the types of greenery you see around towns and cities. This is because they are around all year long and need no maintenance. Also because the scene is set around this time of year there isn't any flowers in bloom yet.

I used some reference form beck home as we have these scattered outside our house along the driveway.

I cut out the parts I wanted and lay them out to create the diffuse map. Making sure I left enough room to cut round them in Max to create the planes. I also crated the bump map to generate the normals.

I used the same workflow I used for the trees to create the plants and the material was also used as it is set up so I can create and instance and swap out the diffuse and normals.

 I experimented with painting the verts to create a realistic look as they blew in the wind. for example the base verts are black so they don't move and all the tips of the leaves are full red so they move the most.

I also changed the parameter in the material to enhance the wind effect.

Lastly I created another instance of the material as I felt I needed more colour variation. In the new instance I changed the parameters for the colours ever so slightly to add a subtle variation.