Brief 2: Places Of Mind (Alpha Masks)
I employed a very well known method to create the alpha masks for the leaves of the tree and to create the wheat plants. I used Adobe Photoshop solely for this process.
For the leaves, I just created a basic leaf and duplicated and resized them to create a bunch of leaves in a square canvas. The leaves were given a white fill and the background was deleted to make the mask transparent.
Figure 1 (Alpha mask for the leaves, 2024)
For the wheat plants, I created an even leaf and resized it thin. A thin rectangle was added to the middle of the canvas and the leaf was resized and duplicated and mirrored on the other side of the stem. Then, I just kept duplicating and resizing those two leaves up the stem and deleted the background to make the mask transparent.
Figure 2 (Alpha mask for the wheat plants, 2024)
I added the wheat mask to blender and duplicated and rotated them 90 degrees to make them double sided and combined the two meshes together to create a final wheat plant mesh.
Before I could proceed further, I had to apply the mask for the wheat plant I created in Photoshop and plug it into the alpha channel for the color node for the main wheat plant.
Figure 3 (Enabling the alpha transparency for the wheat mesh, 2024)
The wheat plants were tweaked and edge loops were added to the mesh. This allowed me to use proportional editing to control the vertices of the edges and shape it to make it look natural so that it doesn't look too stiff when I will add a wind simulation to it in Unreal.
Figure 4 (Proportional editing the final wheat mesh, 2024)