Tree Quadtych

Scanning a tree

I was kicking around the park while my daughter was furiously trying to learn the monkey bars (No help daddy!). To kill some time I took photos of a tree with my phone. The tree was in the shade so I figured I could do a low-quality photogrammetry pass on it. It turned out blobby but usable. Not bad for an old Iphone 6.

I pulled the normals and displacement in Xnormal. There was still a lot of directional light in the diffuse so I de-lit the diffuse in photoshop using the world normal of the lighting direction as a color mask. Also did some color correction.

I used Substance Painter to create a roughness map using the curvature, occlusion and some procedurals. Rather than guess at a roughness range I checked the histogram of a quixel tree scan's roughness then crammed mine into that range.

Working the model

Then I had a perfectly fine tree model. But that's boring. I thought it might be cool to make a quadtych. 4 distinct images that make up a larger one. I wanted to upload it to instagram and thought I could post the 4 images sequentially so the full image could be scrolled through one piece at a time. I wanted the images to get progressively more surreal as they went. Images below, rotated vertical for format.

The work was done in Maya. The ferns and wood slices are quixel. Render in Arnold. Tentacles in Xgen. Post in Photoshop. Full render below.

If you want to learn more about photogrammetry and have an hour to spare, everything is covered in detail in the amazing Star Wars: Battlefront GDC presentation.