Wayfinder Fan Art - Foliage

This tree was made during a workshop at Artside under the supervision of Romain Durand.

He explained to us how to work on a stylised tree, and we followed what he had taught us. This one is based on a concept by Geraud Soulie, but adapted in the Wayfinder art direction.

It is a difficult process, but worthwhile. The purpose is to sculpt only the first 2 or 3 meters of the tree because this is the part we will see on camera, and the rest will be covered by a tileable. So it gets different UV sets on the same asset: one for the baked UV where I also put the rest of the tree to get some variation if I want instead of the tileable; one for the tileable; one for the global position of my tree (just a projection of the front view into the UV but I can get top down gradient using texture coordinates in shader) and a last one for wind skinning information.
In the process we also saw some advanced shader tricks. And how to create a cool Master Material for a birch tree.

I also added wind to the tree using Pivot Painter Skinning, which meant I had to export my model in 3DS Max for the plugin to work even though I mainly use Blender. I created a custom system for my wind using the Material Parameter Collection to ensure some wind intensity and direction on all my foliage assets.

The character you can see in the Technical video, was kindly lent by Julian Hoarau.
I am very grateful to him.