The Summoning 03
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This the part of the project that I got back to my treemaking. In the beginning of this project (after the writing of the style guide) I got the task of modelling the trees for the environment. I started this task by researching different types of tree that are/were native to Japan to get the feeling of the setting in the game. After collecting a bunch of references I ended up with three types of trees that looked similar but not too similar so it would become the same tree in the end. I didn’t want them to be too different either to get the feeling of the environment not to be not as cohesive either. The most important in this game are the characters, the buildings and the things that the player can interact with. After all the research I started to model the three trees in 3Ds Max. The most challenging part was to make the tree as low poly as it could get without looking strange and not organic enough. Because our game will have top down perspective it is unnecessary to have to many polygons on a model that will not be shown in the finished product. It is also unnecessary due to not making everything in the game engine heavy to process because we will reuse the same model for a lot for the environment. Because the game is set in a fictional world I didn’t stay to close to the reference (it is after all just a reference). The task of drawing the leaves got to a halt after a while. This were due to some unfortunate technical difficulties that has to do with my drawing tablet. It decided to stop working entirely. After a while I decided to entirely use whatever I had because the borrowed tablet’s drivers were to old. Oh well why am I rambling on about this non important detail. To go back to the point. I decided to find textures online that I could use without the copyright. I just made the textures black and white with different levels and brightness/contrast so they looked more drawn than a photograph in Photoshop. I also added a black outline so it would look similar to the artstyle that we are going for. I added the black outline because when I imported the planes in Unity I couldn’t use the shaders that were used for the other props because then it wouldn’t use the alpha but the whole plane. After some tweaking with the alpha mask in photoshop and levels and brightness/contrast I got the result that I wanted. I wanted to get the feeling of an old ink painting where the shadows and overlapping is more darkn than the rest in the painting. This though took up so much time from my part. I think it is because I needed to try and do something and then export it from Photoshop and import it into Unity and there fix with the settings on the materials. Maybe it could have been done in a faster way but I didn’t have enough time when I had deadlines and this was a way that worked for me. This is the result of the three finished trees with the leaves (note that this is my ”test scene” in Unity where I can test assets with the shaders and not the finished level):
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