Recently, I've been working on some modeling and research. I started by making a quick block out of the badger.
When I placed it in the level at first, I realized that the burrow was way too large. I scaled it down quite a bit to match the badger.
Next I want to focus more on the surrounding foliage to help draw the eye to the badger burrow. I did some research on biomes in the area and decided to base this environment on an Alpine Krummholz ecological community.
An Alpine Krummholz occurs in high elevation areas at around 3500 feet. Trees are often bent, twisted, and stunted due to strong winds and snow. I think having these abnormally shaped trees will help this feel like a mystical and somewhat alien environment that you could expect to find strange creatures in.
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| "Prevailing wind" by John Spooner CC BY-NC 2.0 |
First, I'm going to model some flowers for the meadow around the badger burrow. I'll start with a large-leaved goldenrod. It's a fairly tall plant with bright yellow flowers. I think the bright flowers could help draw attention to the burrow.
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| "Solidago macrophylla 5" by Nadiatalent CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Currently, I think I'll have separate cards for the large leaves and flowers. Some clusters of smaller leaves and flowers could probably be combined into single cards. I drew some red outlines over the reference to plan how I'll break it up into cards.
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| This image, "Card Plan", is a derivative of "Solidago macrophylla 5" by Nadiatalent, used under CC BY-SA 4.0 "Card Plan" is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 by Dylan Collins. |
I think this will be a good first experiment to figure out an approach for the foliage. I want to try starting with a photo reference for the leaf and sculpting the macro details for it. That can be baked into a normal map and used for the card and for generating clusters. I found a few tutorials detailing this method that I'm going to reference. One is Jobye Karmaker's talk "Digital Dragons 2019 Talk Video - Approaching Modular Vegetation in Games." The other is Peyton Varney's "Protégé Foliage Tutorial."
Both tutorials involve sculpting macro leaf details. One main difference is Jobye's uses photo sources while Peyton's uses Substance Designer to generate the base color. I think I'm going to try both. I'll probably stick with photos for this plant. I found some fairly high resolution ones that I can use. In the future, I'll probably try Substance on any plants that I can't find good photos for.
Aside from trying these new techniques, I also want to set up the foliage to react with Bigfoot when he walks through it. My initial thought is using pivot painter along with a material parameter collection for his location in world space. There's going to be a lot of foliage in the level for Bigfoot to walk through. It would be great to set up some standardized way of handling it so all the foliage can have this behavior.
I'm excited to try out these new foliage techniques. Hopefully I can reach a decent quality level and get a unique look to the environment. Once I finish this first flower model, I'd like to apply the same process to any future foliage and maybe find ways to streamline it.
References
Karmaker, Jobye. “Digital Dragons 2019 Talk Video - Approaching Modular Vegetation in Games."
Jobye Karmaker || Senior Environment Artist, 3 June 2019, https://jobyek.com/projects/2x54OY.
"Online Conservation Guide for Alpine krummholz." Alpine Krummholz Guide,
New York Natural Heritage Program, 2020 https://guides.nynhp.org/alpine-krummholz/.
Varney, Peyton. “Protégé Foliage Tutorial." Protégé Foliage Tutorial, 2018,
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z4v5N.
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