The tree is rotated 90 degrees, four times, where at every turn a screenshot is captured. I ended up creating a solution where I create an orthographic camera, and fit it to encompass the bounds of a given tree prefab. Unless they were creating using the editor’s “Tree Creator” (personally, not a fan). Most, if not all, of the trees offered on the Unity Asset Store do not offer this. But I had no means of creating these outside of SpeedTree. I also wanted to add billboards for the trees, most games utilize them, for good reason. The polycount was already so low that it required precision work. It was a painstaking task to manage, but I couldn’t be happier with the result!įor the smaller assets such as the flowers I made the LODs manually. I had much more success with swapping out the tree branch meshes with a lower poly version. Making the LOD transitions painfully noticeable. Soon after, I had the result I was looking for.įor the trees however, I didn’t pan out right, often the tree trunk would be destroyed entirely, or the silhouette would differ too much. So why not go directly for an image? For this purpose, I started experimenting in Substance Designer by distributing grass blades in a horizontal line. I have done that in the past, and it took me several days to get the density just right. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time modeling high poly vegetation if the result was going to be an image anyway. And I couldn’t afford to postpone the release for several months. I would have loved to explore Houdini for this purpose, but I only have a smidge of experience with it. It was painstaking work, and a prime reminder of why I don’t intend to do work a computer could do for me. I ended up using the Unity tree creator for the trunk and branches, and used 3DS Max to distribute branch meshes onto that mesh. You can imagine that put quite the damper on the project. Unfortunately, the week before I intended to submit the Fantasy Adventure Environment it was brought to my attention that the SpeedTree EULA does not allow you to distribute your productions outside of a game. At which point you might even find out that it’s not an improvement after all. You can imagine how painstaking that might be if you had to this manually. If you’re curious what your tree would look with thicker branches, you simply change a value and the effect carries through. Where they allow you to propagate changes from the start of the node-chain all the way to the end result. Tools like Substance Designer and SpeedTree, are both procedural and node-based, which makes it easy to experiment. Rather than constantly going back and forth. In a way, it’s like bringing a photoshop document into the engine, and allowing you to adjust its parameters there. They enable you to fine tune part of the art in context. Utilizing Substance materials elevates some of this frustration where textures are concerned. It’s far from ideal to finally bring an asset into your game and realize it visually doesn’t work out. One of my principles regarding production is that iteration should not be destructive. It led me to trying to find a streamlined procedural approach to art production. This was also reinforced by my lack of traditional art skills, and a reluctance to improve in that area. When I started learning the ins and out of 3D production, the programmer side of me always had its eye on automation. It lends it with a bit of a personal touch. With stylized art, the abstraction has the viewer fill in the blanks, however they may see it. I believe people, in games, ultimately like to see something different from what they’re already familiar with. I’ve never been very attracted the idea of achieving realism in game art. Ever since, I’ve been aspiring to be able to convey the same. With summery landscapes, filled with lush vegetation and mountainscapes - ripe for exploring. And I just loved how with mere screenshots they managed to the convey the premise to a grand adventure. At the time, there were only screenshots available of these games. It was heavily inspired by Dragon Quest XI and Breath of the Wild. This ultimately led to my “Fantasy Adventure Environment”, which I later ported to Unity for the Asset Store. I set out with the goal to make an adventure environment using the engine, with a secondary focus on designing a production pipeline. I was curious about exploring Unreal Engine 4. I had to decide how I was going the spent the next six months improving my skills as a Technical Environment Artist. About the time my minor term was around the corner.
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