Seamless Autumn Leaves Material…

This post is about further experiments with Artomatix and 3D scanning to create usable, seamless PBR materials. A few months back I was standing at a bus stop for what seemed like ages and got really bored, so I took out the phone and started taking photos of the ground around me. There were a lot of fallen leaves around the bus stop, mixed with overgrown ivy and weeds. I took about 20 photos and loaded them into Reality Capture that evening just to see if anything could be made of them. I wasn’t expecting great things due to the small number of photos I had and the half-arsed nature of the shoot, and indeed results weren’t perfect, some leaves were nicely sharp but others were a blobby mess or missing completely. I still baked down the geometry to diffuse, normals, height and dropped the normal map into Knald for quick AO and cavity maps. There wasn’t enough usable info to make a square texture, I settled for bakes of 4096 x 2048. I stuck the assets in my “partial scans” folder and left it for months, until this week.

Artomatix came to the rescue, after duplicating the original textures and laying them out side by side in square 4K textures with very obvious repeats, I loaded them into Artomatix and was able to crudely mask out the problem areas and generate a tiling material from the 3DSMax bakes. I also saturated the diffuse to create a sub surface scattering map on the fresher leaves. Height could be better so I’ll revisit when time allows. This is the albedo input, the painted mask and the output from Artomatix: