Backyard Foliage

I was playing around with Quixel assets and wanted to create my own foliage.

I started by picking up a piece of black display board from the dollar store and and went out in my back yard looking for plants I liked the look of.

I then took pictures of them before pulling them up and disassembling them so I could lay them out on the board. I took several pictures of each then uploaded them to my computer to process them. Using Photoshop I created an action that would cut out the background and save the images to a new folder. These would become the Albedo maps. For the normals I used Photoshop again to convert the albedo to a normal map and tweaked them until I got the desired results.

From there I took the materials into blender to cut out the leaves and various cards to create meshes for foliage and arranged them based on my reference images.

For the tree
Used a different approach than I typically would take for this one. I started with a single vert, extruded the shape of the base tree added a subdivision modifier, a skin modifier then another subdiv on top of that. From there I tweaked the mesh to get the desired result, subdivided that, exported to zbrush for some quick detail, unwrapped and textured the base then brought it back to blender, cut out one of the branches, resized it made some changes then using the fern material I had made from my backyard foliage I created the leaves. used a particle system to distribute them over the branch based on a vertex group, baked that down and repeated to add the branches to the tree. Makes for some very quick variations just by hitting the seed button in the particle system. Happy with how it turned out for about a days work.

Had a lot of fun making these and I have way more pictures of foliage waiting to be created.