Playing around with the Environment

 I've been messing around with large prop art, specifically environment. For the first area, I wanted something based off of water carved canyons cause they're gorgeous and also because I wanted a tall, large environment. There's still a lot of tweaking needed, like extra plants or additions just so the canyon doesn't feel so empty. The floor is also extremely low poly so I have to bevel some ledges. I'm also running into big performance hits when the resolution is large + most frame drops come from lighting and shadows so I have to look into that. I'm hoping godot 4 will help optimize things a bit.

Sky texture from Richard Whitelock: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/221

Oct22 update - This week I've just been stepping back from animations or the combat system, just need a break from them, so I went on a modeling spree.

Realistically, these water canyons don't have much plant life at all, probably because of the regular flooding that occurs. The flooding isn't going to be a thing in this case, so I'm putting in some plant life, also so it'll look more interesting.

My experience 3d modeling is almost entirely character art, with some weapon art, so environment art with plants has been a new thing for me. One of the difficulties I've run into is figuring out whether I should go with transparency or actual geometry. Trees and grasses prettymuch have to use transparency but flowers, maybe vines in general inhabit this gray area of needing fewer polygons than those but also needing a lot of instances, but transparency just doesn't have the geometry especially if you have larger flowers. In the end I went with more geometry because even some of my more intensive meshes have had 4k tris~ish per instance and that's really not too much when you compare with some games that have character models filling the screen and those take at around 10k. I tried to focus on plants that occur in drier areas. Above are some of plants made this week. 

The games stylized, but I try to add in just enough detail without doing too much detail to keep it within a style that matched everything else, and use the same brush types for painting each time.  I also didn't want to spend too much time on each asset since my time is so limited. Each asset took about 2-3 hours (except the grasses, those took less). The palm leaves for example took me 15 min to paint. The trunk just gave me some trouble so that took longer. On the left is a desert lily, I saw it and I knew I had to have it for pun reasons but also it is extremely pretty. The bougainvillea inspired vine is the most poly intensive, with 4k tris, but I won't be spamming it constantly so a few instances of it on screen should be fine.











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