FMP: Week 11 Monday

On week 11 I began working on the foliage vfx, firstly by following the workflow that this tutorial mentioned, which meant sculpting and baking the foliage.

On Monday, I first began by creating the masks I would import into zbrush:

Originally, I had included the grass in these masks, but later decided to skip them and have them be flat,
as adding normal maps to them felt like too unnecessary detail.

I then impoted them into zbrush as alphas and pressed the 'make 3D' button. This made them fairly jagged around the edges, and unnecessarily thick, so I flattened them and created polygroups by the 'Group Front' option. After this, I masked off and deleted the side I didn't need. Wherever I wanted to keep an edge, I masked off and created a new polygroup so that I could crease by polygroups. Now that I had a simple plane, I used the 'Panel Loops' option in EdgeLoop to create some thickness with a slight bevel. This created new edges with different polygroups in the areas I wanted to keep the edges sharp, which meant that after creasing by polygroup I could subdivide on smooth to get rid of any jagged edges I didn't want without losing the form.

The first piece of foliage I sculpted was the elephant leaf plant head

For the elephant leaf, I used a combination of dam standard, the orbs cracks brush and pinch depending on how soft I wanted the effect to be for the creases. I strategically placed the creases to be bolder than the original reference image, with less creases as I didn't want it to be too detailed. A the end of the sculpt I also added some clay polish to further increase the stylisation.

I chose elephant leaves because I've been loosely themeing
the location off of borneo and surrounding areas