Planting trees in our world

Author: Salireths

I've modelled and then added some neat trees and shrubbery into the level…

Of course it's not as simple as it sounds, especially since I never modeled proper semi-realistic trees before! That one old tree I did doesn't count - its way too cartoony. It was quite a learning experience, and I'm just getting started - I will be adding more tree species and variations over time.

With all this new shader and environment work that is going on, the game is starting to look much more realistic than before, though I'm still keeping it "loose" - dropping noise and details on purpose. The idea is to match the general style of background paintings you occasionally see on expensive pieces of furry art.

There is also a lot of benefits from this style - It allows us to use external resources to speed up the game development, such as using free megascans, or bought stuff from marketplace (though, with the current state, we need to get more income before we can afford purchasing things). 

We can take these realistic assets as a base and run them through my custom stylization filter I developed for textures. And if I need some entirely new textures that don't exist in real world (or too difficult to obtain) - no problem, I can just paint them by hand, relatively quickly and loosely like a sketch. All without spending weeks of work if it was actual realism or even if it was a more cartoony Blizzard-like style.

This is what I did for the tree, I took the texture of bark and ran it through a filter, while painting all the pine needles myself.

There are programs that create trees faster, and a lot of big companies use them (maybe you heard of Speed Tree) but it's not something we can afford right now. Free programs, like TreeIt, don't really make them good enough either.

Since we don't need a lot of trees, after some research, I decided to just do it the old-fashioned way, manually, even if that might take a bit of time.

The tree is assembled out of individual branches, and branches are assembled out of 3d stems and flat leaves, gluing pieces together one-by-one, all by hand.

Then the special shader adds a wind effect (it's still not finished - it sometimes divides by 0, and we all know its bad for the universe!) on the leaves and adds a subtle sway to the trunk and branches so it looks more alive.

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Hope you enjoyed a shorter post format, with any luck I'll be able to keep this up - this has been my intention for a long time already, it just always devolves into massive posts at the end of the month!

With lots of Dragon love.

- Salireths