Week 2: First Plant

 This week I created materials and meshes for my first plant type. 

 

One new technique that I used is generating the materials in Substance Painter. Since I had height information from the ZBrush sculpt, I could create a lot of variation with fill layers and generators. As an example, I used the "Dust Dirty" smart mask to make the leaf veins yellow.

Since the ZBrush leaves had different Polygroups, I also baked an ID mask. With this mask, I created a different color overlay layer for each leaf. This made it so some leaves could be a little more yellow and others more blue-green. This subtle variation adds some more contrast to the plant so the leaves don't feel like they're all one flat color.

Example of some of the different layers used.

Overall I think it's off to a decent start. Next I'm going to start on a tree. It should be a great way to better familiarize myself with SpeedTree!