Machu Picchu Tree

I was put to work mostly on the Machu Picchu level alongside with Ryan Sullivan, the art director on Scrapyard.  He taught me a ton over the course of the first half of the project duration and I really feel that I've grown a lot since I first came on, hardly knowing anything about how to work with UDK.  Now, I've gained enough knowledge to navigate UDK and get stuff done.

While the Junkyard level was more about metal, fire and lights lighting up the dark, Machu Picchu stands at the opposite end being mostly organic and lush with plant life, spacious, bright, majestic and ancient.  At the get go, I was quickly put to work blocking out the terraces, the ruins and from there...well...everything else! :)

The entire UDK foliage package was stuff that I made with great excitement due to the fact that I never really had a solid chance to tackle foliage creation when I attended Gnomon and here was my chance!

Tree - Machu Picchu

Trees from Afar

Below you will see the texture maps that I used for the tree branches.  A quick look into my workflow: I modeled out a high poly leaf in Maya, added a texture and after some deformation, baked out it's normal, diffuse color and AO.  I then created a simple poly card which I applied the leaf texture to.

My next step was to model out the branch itself and then duplicated the low poly leaf card on the branch.  I repeated the baking process again and below is the result:

Branch NORMAL

Branch DIFFUSE

Branch High Poly in MAYA