Painting a forest 03

one of the main elements of this biome is the fact that it is going to be done in a hand painted style.
To achieve this, but  still maintain the realism of the mood sheet, most of the textures are going to be sculpted in zbrush, and then converted into normal maps, made tileable, and then have a diffuse layer painted based on that. 

Birch top layer

birch under bark layer 

fir tree bark

using wrap mode and a series of cubes, some of the tillable textures were fairly easy to make.
other elements like the foliage cards needed to be rendered out of zbrush so they would have mask layers come with them. 

made with a hand sculpted IMM brush with curve mode turned on in stroke setting

once the final sculpts were made, I set their materials to be the Normal RBG material inside of zbrush. Then I framed the sculpts on a document size of 1024x1024 and exported them. Taking them into photo shop i made them tilable then in a new document I painted their diffuse layers.  

For the foliage cards I rendered the framed image from zbrush, then I placed the mask layer into the alpha channel of the texture.