Over the last few months I’ve been working on a new level, “Glade Forest” on Unity, a personal project that improves my skillset needed to work in the Gaming industry. Plot: who is the boss to defeat? the Wily Wolf! In order to defeat it and get the reward, we will need the help of Wart, a hermit who lives in a cabin in the woods.
I designed the Level Map, and focused on a portion only (the red rectangle).
I then moved to the Concept phase, illustrating the principal view.
Research and picking up inspiration: this is always fun and adventurous. I needed to recreate a forest in the woods, adding colour and variations.
So I added a few bothanical species, like the ornamental plum tree, it is very common here in Italy. You don’t usually see one growing spontaneously in a forest, but it’s not rare eather.
I then modeled in 3DS Max the HD assets and props, UVs too, and tested all the Foliage and trees.
I’ve made oaks, plane trees, maple trees and pines.
Usually it is often used #speedtree in the industry, but since I’m in the learning phase, I preferred to make trees from scratch in 3Ds Max.
Prune Tree
Plane Tree
Oaks
Red & Green Maples
Prune Tree test in Unity
Pine Trees : Half Dead, Healthy big and small.
I created all the necessary leaves #atlas in Substance , #maps, and baked #normal in #3Dsmax in order to add details to the tree branches.
Albedo map
Normal map
AO map
Opacity map
Roughness map
I discovered how to modify the #vertex normals on a tree in order to give it a pleasant effect without doing it one by one.
Testing Vertex Normals on a Maple Tree
Testing Vertex Normals on a Maple Tree
Testing Vertex Normals on a Maple Tree
Now it’s the #texturing turn: my favourite part, I love to recreate reality giving it that extra spice: in this case, I had fun with lichens, mud, erosion and so on with the rocks.
Finally, I replaced all the assets of the Boxing phase with the high-detail models ( low poly count, optimized) in Unity, adding the various Collisions in order to navigate the scene.
Lighting and Post Production entirely tailor-made for the night Scene.