My foilage sucks!

Help people, I need to make better tree leaves / foilage for my sculpted fruit trees. Currently I have a hollowed out sphere textured with a sickly looking green 'leaf' texture with transparency so that it has a somewhat palm leaf look to it. I tried to sculpt foilage, but that turned out to look like a spider, and I tried the usual square textures linked in 4 or 6 or 8, to give that bushy look but against the sculpted tree that sucks too.

Has anyone got some good basics I can use to set out, maybe sculpting trees and leaves or emulating that through a texture or two? I want to learn as I did with the actual tree, but need some pointers to set out the basics properly.

I have never tried making a tree myself, so I'm afraid I can't offer you wise words from personal experience. Julia Hathor makes some beautiful ones, though. Take a little time to wander around her sim (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Shadow%20Brook/72/197/25) and see how she does it. SOme of her large ones use a LOT of prims, but I think they are quite convincing.

Thanks Rolig, I went and looked at the plants she makes and I agree that they are beautiful. I did use a similar technique to hers, but she has so much better looking foilage textures, which is where the difference is. I have decided to make my trees available for free with the scripts I did so that someone with a better hand at art can try and make more beautiful fruit tree versions
I was hoping some folks here would be able to guide me in understanding better texturing techniques to achieve better affects, but unlike the scripting tips forum that is very active with such assistance, other than yourself here, no one seems inclined to help .
Not a bother, simply change my tack and leave this type of texturing to the professionals who can sell it on at a fortune as usual .

AFAIK, no residents have yet managed to make convincing sculpted foliage for SL. You certainly couldn't do it with sculpties so, unless you are a 3D whizz with high-end equipment, the better approach is to aim for an impression of the plant.

What you can do is design your plant parts as alpha textures. You need very high-res photos to begin with. Increase the detail beyond what looks realistic (SL favours high colour) either by painting on the picture or by adjusting your saturation & contrast. Or both. Julia's plants and the Hearts' tend to feature pronounced highlights & shadows; in Photoshop you might want to experiment with rendering (leaves are plastic & matt).

If you think your leaves look too flat in shape, it's a good idea to try using either a squashed cylinder cut in half, or taper your box at one end. Add just a tiny amount of wind flexibility; again you can experiment with different settings to get a good 'rustling' effect.

Hope this helps a bit!
Cherry

Hi Cherry,

Wow, this is great! I will certainly try the second approach, as though I can do pretty well with sculpting, you're quite right that other than branches, they are hard to use for foilage.

The issue for me is about flatness, and currently I use half a sphere with several versions and sizes to make things look a little better, but your tips on actual textures is so much appreciated because this is where I go wrong. I will try to amend and change, and replace my source textures too, and then see what it all turns out as. I'm also going to experiment with your ideas about the base prim for the textures, and replace the sphere with the cylinder or a tapered box.

And WIND effects what was I thinking, flex would work beautifully for effect. Thank you for that tip too. Ok, so maybe I can try this again.

Cheers
Good luck!

Thank you for the kind thought, Dumisani, but I think you'll find that this forum is loaded wih helpful folks. I can easily think of a sturdy list of regular contributors who have taught me a lot.

Texturing is a tricky business, not easily reduced to rules and formulas. There are certainly technical skills that can make your work cleaner and quicker, but as I noted in a parallel thread yesterday, excellent tools don't make you an artist. That takes a certain amount of native talent, a keen eye, lots of practice, and feedback from others. Except for the feedback, those things aren't easy to provide in an on-line forum, so we tend to focus on the nuts and bolts skills. Those are enough to satisfy many people, but they don't address good questions like yours.

With respect to our friends in the Scripting Tips forum, I think they have the same challenges. There is a world of difference between a script that works and one that is elegant, and a great scripter isn't just a powerful technician. Still, I think you can go much farther on skill alone in the world of scripting than you can with textures. That makes difference to the style of our two forums -- neither good nor bad, just different.

I am not an artist, BTW .... just a retired academic with a small talent and a lifetime of amateur practice, discovering a new medium. Like you, I watch this forum for technical tips to add to my toolbox. The exchanges I enjoy most, though, are the ones when people share examples of their work and open them to critique. Almost as good are the ones that swap SLURLs or links to work on the web. Those are the posts that help you grow as an artist. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, "You can see a lot by just looking."

Hi Rolig, thanks for the wonderful response again. I appreciate the view you have of the forum and the difficult issue of talent versus no-talent
However, my request was not about having someone teach me texturing, rather about having the advice like Cherry gave, which was right on the mark for me.
In the scripting tips forum, highly skilled Second Life scripters (and I add Second Life specifically) are very quick to guide people in a direction that works for something the person is trying to create, and even hand out code when they have time to help show that person a real example of what to do.

So my statement of a group inclined to help or not was based on the fact that other than your response, I had no other from anyone after 2 days. I did not want free assistance or a lesson in art, but simply a guide from someone with foilage experience in what works and what does not work in Second Life. Again I stress within SL as it is here that I find the problems come out clearly after seeing a creation of mine in Photoshop look absolutely perfect. Once imported the texture fails to impress and looks miserable

So I had hoped some of the gurus here like Cherry would give me some hints in the way to bring those textures into SL properly and how to make them look best within a tree foilage. As usual I should have waited an extra day (I'm way too impatient) since Cherry's response was right on the money. So despite all this thread, I owe you all an apology as I did not wish to offend this group at all, and clearly I received the help in the end that I thought was not forthcoming

Now off to the workshop ...

I think it really depends on your approach and ultimate goal in achieving what you want in foliage.

I personally feel that most any one familiar with the basic tools and functions in Photoshop (and similar programs) can take a picture of an actual tree and it's foliage and crop out the wanted parts for an cutout styled tree.

The harder ones would be the ones that are actually hand painted either from scratch or using a 3rd party rendering 3D graphics programs and then post processing until the desired results is achieved. FD Spark makes some of the most beautiful if not artistic foliage forms from scratch using the mouse and various paint programs. I myself employ Bryce 5.5 to render random branch and leaf fractals to get a guide or idea for hand painting, or setting against a 'Green Screen' for cut out usage. I did this recently when i found my tree needed a massive 'Root Network'.

I think Sculpties are still viable for foliage because it always needs a base trunk too and alot of free (and inexpensive) sculpt edit programs generate some very nice organic forms indeed.

If you really think about it, foliage is and isn't perfect in presentation, it has symmetry and randomness all at the same time that nature tends to perfect.

Thanks to everyone for all the help and advice. For what its worth, here is the finished product with the foliage I used in the end, sculpted as I am a little better with that then painting

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Bishara%20Island/220/196/23

Please evaluate and comment anytime. Most of the work was on the scripts I also wrote and the sculpties of course.

I am not good with sculpties but there are programs like sculpty paint, rokuro, etc that if you experiment enough you could get a shape of tree 1 prim maybe and draw out the texture hard part is placement of the plants but this is extremely tricky and I am still struggling with it.
Any shape properly textured could work if you can't figure out the sculpties but its lot harder to do certain shapes that look like right..
Sphere shaped bushes those are pain.
Sculpties that are all twisted up are very, very difficult to do.
I know Cel has figured out to generate some interesting leaves with sculpty paint but for life me I haven't figured out how he gets those shapes.
I like to know myself in terms I could understand.
Thanks Hunter for compliments, thanks for helping me this wieek with spheres.etc.

Hi TD, thanks for the headsup. I truly appreciate this. I actually went the way of sculpting my tree completely and though I am happy with trunk and fruit shape and textures, I realize that my foliage will be a version 0.1 and hopefully get better going forward The only downside of using sculpted textured prims to make foliage is that they cannot be flex. But for the first version of my fruit tree range, I think it turned out ok

As with my scripting it will be practice practice practice to ensure success for the second tree and its foliage!

By the way, the SLURL to see what all this hulabala was about is in my previous response.

I have seen some really great trees which used tree trunk part for sculpties and transparent flat prims for the actual leave part. I have made some lovely tree bark and some sculpties using just basic sculpty shapes but nothing yet fancy in that area.
I may try again.
If you can use blender which is really hard to learn I think there more control and with new sculpty paint updates there are ways to use blender files within sculpty paint for painting textures.
I haven't yet figured it out though.