#6 - Trees

So, my initial plan with the trees (documented in a previous blog post), was to author super unique, sculpted trees. With time running out, that approach isn't going to happen.

So instead, I opted to combine Substance Designer and the free SpeedTree alternative "TreeIt", to create some "good enough" trees.

I think it's safe to say from the result, that they're at least a vast improvement on the placeholder.

There are three variations, one large, medium, and smaller tree, which the parameter-based generation of TreeIt made very easy to produce.

Within TreeIt, the result of the medium tree looks like this:

With the Alpha of the leaf cards not working correctly, it takes some imagination to picture how it's going to look in-engine.

The trunk texture was created in Substance Designer, with a combination of effects like slope-blur, colour variation, light, and curvature nodes.

The leaf cards were a very simple alpha, made in photoshop by randomly scattered cutouts of oak leaves:

I then added two simple materials, one for the trunk, which blends in some extra random patches of moss, and one for the leaves, which allows you to change the colour of the foliage, and also adds in some slight colour variation on the edges, using the Fresnel node:

It would be nice to implement some form of parallax or tesselation to get a bit more detail out of the simple material.

Nicer still, would be to fully rework these and get nice sculpted, unique versions in place, as was my original intent, but that's looking like a job for after submission.

The next job is the house itself, which is a huge chunk of work, and really shouldn't have been left untouched for as long as it has.