How to Create a foliage Atlas

What is a leaf Atlas

A leaf atlas is a texture that contains all of our leaves in a single texture. We can then create geometry based on this texture that then used to attach to of any geometry, but in our case our branch geometry.

Let’s take a look at what a leaf atlas is and what to look out for when creating our own.

VIDEO EDITING NOTES:
- Needs to be edited so it matches our branding
- Audio for the video needs to be cleaned up
- The end needs to be cleaned up
- Video voice over can be sped up by 25 percent?
- Editing to cut out all the "uhmns"
- Can be condensed to be more focused

Image above Shows the difference between a "LEAF ATLAS" and a "LEAF CLUSTER"

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using photogrammetry in our process

There are multiple ways of creating these textures for ourself, usually you would create them in Substance Painter or even Sculpt them yourself. However, we can also use photogrammetry for this purpose.

In the following picture we can see a set of holly bush leaves which I have scanned using the Photometric Stereo Scanning Method, which is also explained here:

EDITING NOTE: Showcase an image of Photometric Stereo Scanning

As these leaves are a bit more difficult to create in Substance Designer, I will be using these scans for the bush creation.

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VIDEO EDITING NOTE:
- This section can be replace with a note and an image instead of a video instead
We can use the transcript for a little text here.

More information on PHOTOGRAMMETRY

For this lesson we will be used the following set of leaves, but you can also follow along with your own textures if you want.

The visual above showcases the leaf atlas that's been used for this lesson

EDITING NOTE: Are we sharing the source files for this? If so, then how?

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Leaf Atlas Overview

Let us take a look at how to modify a scanned leaf atlas in Substance Designer and add any bits that are missing. In Blender, any missing parts, like fruits and berries can be modelled and unwrapped to the texture sheet.

VIDEO EDITING NOTE:
- This section feels a bit random, starting from a random texture to then just add a berry to it, feels out of place.

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Breaking down a structure

To understand what we need to create we need to grab a lot of references of the foliage we want to create. Additionally, it helps a lot if we draw on top of our reference images to make sure we fully understand the branch structure of the piece of foliage we are creating.

Understanding the plant structure is integral to be able to model it in the correct way.

More information on REFERENCE GATHERING

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VIDEO EDITING NOTE:
- Polish video audio, there are some little breaks
- Maybe cleanup the visuals? Make them more brand apropiate?
- Might be better to show our visuals instead of Dennis's ones

EDITING NOTE:
Showcase a more thorough breakdown of the same tree above

⚠️ EXERCISE:
Exercise is researching a self found foliage picture to try and distill it into separate pieces.

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Creating our foliage atlas

Now that we understand the recipe for creating the holly bush fronds and branches, we can start with practically creating them. For that, we will be using SpeedTree to model the leaf cards and branches, which will later be baked into a 2D texture for the bush. Depending on your budget this step can be skipped.

EDITING NOTE: Showcase the different area's we will be creating. branches, leaves ad leaf clusters

In modern foliage for AAA game production, smaller plants at least use leaves and geometry branches directly. For our case, we will be using leaf cards still to work in a performant way and to understand the essence of creating performant foliage. Nonetheless, for the berries, we want to attach them as physical objects to the bush, so we do not include those in the texture.

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Creating Our Branches

First stop is creating our branch cards, these will be used as the secondary layer, after our geometry of our trunk and first layer of branches to then transition between the geometry level and the texture level. Making it as seamless as possible.

VIDEO EDITING NOTE:
- Cut down the video to make it more condensed
- Fix background video not running through video
- RaKis not Rachis connotation! Will need to be edited in, Dennis will send me a 1 second clip (need to find timestamp in Davinci)
- Remove task bar from video

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Creating Leaf Cards

Any piece of foliage will usually have some sort of greenery attached to it, so how do we go about creating that?

In a previous section we created a texture for our leaves, we can now start using this texture to help us create the leaf clusters. For that we need to go back to that texture really quick and make sure they are setup to be used in the next video.

VIDEO EDITING NOTE:
- Background Music cuts out

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Creating our leaf clusters

Using the now cut-out pieces of foliage we can now include them into our foliage atlas to use down the line. Combining these individual leaves and some geometry allows us to make our leaf fronds (branches with leaves that are just using flat textures).

VIDEO EDITING NOTE:
- Fix background audio track missing
- Remove bottom taskbar

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Finishing Our Foliage Atlas

As we created all the individual components of our foliage atlas, it's time to assembled them all so we can bake them into our final foliage atlas.

Imaging that we are looking at a top-down view of your final UV. We can then move and rotate all these components into place on this UV allowing for a high Texel density leaving as low amount of unused UV space as possible.

VIDEO EDITING NOTE:
- Fix background audio track missing
- Remove bottom taskbar

EDITING NOTE: Image shows before and after of our foliage atlas.

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This finished our foliage texture creation for our piece of foliage, we did this by analysing the plant structure distilling it to it's components and then turning those into a texture we can use.

We are going to be using this texture in the lesson on "Creating a holly bush", However, the principles remain the same wether you want to create grass, a bush or a tree, they all require the creation of a foliage atlas.

⚠️ EXERCISE:
Exercise is creating your own foliage atlas based on what we learned in this lesson.

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