BGP Art – Trees and LODs

Not a lot has changed since last week, regarding my work responsibilites. I have mostly been starting on new assets and finishing others. 

Among these, we now have all 6 completed trees + 1 dead tree.

The new birch trees has a very simple base and normal texture for the bark, yet detailed enough for players to identify the tree as a birch. The birch trees where chosen because the brighter bark would introduce another color to the world in comparison to darker pine trees. The leaves of the birch also differentiates  from the pines with a warmer orange color. 

And all in all, most of the assets which are needed for the level based puzzles are done as well which means that I can spend the latter part of next week doing some set dressing!

These two weeks has gone by fairly smoothly and I haven’t encountered too many problems along the way. But two things have been bothering me: 

Pink ribbons and UE4’s LOD system 

Pink Ribbons

Our world consists of a lot of brown, orange and green colors, even the obejcts which the players will interact with since they are created by the materials in the game world. So one part of the feedback we received last week was that we might need to highlight the interactive objects in some way. So what looks good in the wind? Ribbons!

We talked to Anders Hedström about color choices and we determined that the pink color would stand out greatly from the rest of the environment. This seems to work, but some does not like the pink color while others think that we can use another solution, and I’m in that latter camp. 

The ribbons work and the do draw attention, but I feel as if it is a lazy design. 

“We want the player to go over there”

“Ok, throw some ribbons on that sucker!”

If we take a look at a game with great level design and environmental art, like The Last of Us, we see that all of their important landmarks have a yellow color. This is probably something that goes undetected by some people and is only picked up by our subconsious, but it is a great way of catching the player’s attention. Our way feels too obvious. 

“Oh there is the pink thing. Let’s go there!” instead of “Hm, I feel like I should walk over there”

I do not have any direct ideas that we can use but I’m going to continue to think about this to see if I can find a better solution.

And finally;

LOD blending. 

UE4 is still a fairly new engine with a lot of missing and half-broken features and this is certainly displayed through their LOD system. 

Our game will have a big landscape where the player can see a long ways away which means that we will have to use LODs for our objects. But unfortunately, UE4 does not have LOD blending which will cause our objects to pop in to view of the player which will look horrible. 

SpeedTree offers a LOD Blending feature for UE4, but just for the objects created in SpeedTree. So our trees will blend just fine while our huts and ziplines will have a popping transition between their LODs. 

LOD blending is on the UE4’s roadmap, but will not be finished by GGC so there is not really anything we can do about it yet.