Next Foliage Pass: Flowers

With my grass finalized, I started work on creating more variety in the foliage.  I've so far added small white flowers, long stemmed blue flowers, weeds, and clovers.  I plan on creating a bush or two to break up the field even more.  Here is the current state of my environment and my grass/foliage texture.

Third Grass Pass

This won't be too in depth of a post, but here's my next pass on grass.  I wanted it to look more natural and wild.  My most recent version of grass had variety, but it was still too even.  I went with thinner and taller blades with a more realistic feel.  The colors are more muted as well.

My next task will be creating other various shrubbery for the environment, including flowers, one-off plants, and bushes.  After that's completed, I'd like to go back and rework my trees a little more.

Grass Creation

The next thing I started to tackle in my scene was grass. It was something that easily gives life to a barren environment. I started by modeling out the blades of grass for my texture. I baked out the texture similar to what I did for the branch, and I applied that to a plane to get my alpha grass.  Instead of adding one plane of grass at a time in CryEngine, I positioned a small batch of planes in 3ds Max and linked them to a dummy.  That way, in CryEngine the vegetation brush will paint multiple planes to quickly populate grass.

With that, I exported the dummy and started to practice painting in grass.  This is the result.

Overall it was super exciting to see the grass in engine!  After getting feedback, one thing that did bother me was how uniform all of the grass was.  They were all even and parallel which looked unnatural, so going back into 3ds Max and Photoshop, I adjusted the blades to give it more variety and a natural look.  The new line of grass models looked like this.

I'm much happier with the adjusted version.  It still looks a little bit sparse, but I'll continue making adjustments.

Monastery Scene

So!  FuturePoly was an amazing experience.  Not working on environments for so long really had me rusty.  Even with the lumberjill project I worked on, the process was more time consuming than it should have been.  The 3D modeling class really opened up the excitement I had while I attended DigiPen.

Creating something of your very own from scratch is so fulfilling, especially seeing the fruits of your labor piece together into something bigger.  The project for the FuturePoly class is to create an environment in CryEngine.  Everything will be done from scratch by myself.  Since this project is mainly about modeling, I'm using a concept that's already been created that speaks to me in design and composition.

This breathtaking speedpaint was done by Daniel Kvasznicza. You can find his other works at www.inetgrafx.com!

The first thing I want to work on is building foliage.  I'll document my process as best as I can!  My first step is planning out the branch I want.  The trees I make won't be that large and unique, as I want to create a shape that can easily repeat without being too obvious.

I compile a rough texture map of the leaves and a petal.  Using that as a template, I model out the pieces.  Here, you can see the density of the models.  In modeling out the thickness of the leaves, I'll be able to get nice details in a projection map.  From there, I create a branch and place the leaves along it.

My next task is the creation of the trunk.  To add in some variation to the forest, I make two alternate tree bases.  Using the projection map of the branch, I fill in the rest of the tree.  I took the first tree into the engine, and the results look good to me!