Metamorphosis Week 4-5

Over the past two weeks, I focused on creating textures for the trees in Adobe Substance Painter. The tree models we received did not have any UVs yet, so I began by creating UVs and arranging them in Maya.

The un-textured trees in Maya

a snapshot of the layers in Substance

I used various layers of colors and noise maps in Substance Painter to create a unique bark texture. I used a combination of tri-planar projection, spherical projection, and UV fill to apply these procedural noises in a way that complemented the shape of the twisting trees. I began with the color of my trees much lighter than the references because I know the scene will have extremely dark lighting, and we want to make sure the background isn't muddy when our fairy is composited in. I incorporated height when working in Substance to create a normal map that can be brought into Houdini Karma to accentuate the feeling of tree bark. Each of these layers also had slight roughness variation to give a more organic feeling. After completing the first tree texture, I had determined the process in which I wanted to achieve all of them. I brought the texture maps into our environment file with preliminary lighting to see how they turned out. The preliminary lighting was slightly dark, so it was a bit difficult to truly see how the materials looked. I knew that more updated, accurate lighting would be on its way soon, so I decided to hold off on making edits until I could see how the textures looked in the updated lighting. I continued to complete the rest of the tree textures while I waited for the new lighting.

One of the trees in Substance Painter

Looking at the current pass of the textures and lighting, I suspect I might have to lighten the base color of the trees so that the textures aren't lost in the dark.

In addition to slight tweaks to the textures after receiving updated lighting, Mia, our environment artist, decided to add one more tree model that is slightly more upright and less fantastical looking. I was debating between keeping this tree following the same style and references as the others, or using references of a different type of tree to add more visual variation. As of right now, I have completed textures that match the other trees, but I would like to maybe play around with a different texture for it and see how it looks among the others.