Off the Map Part 7

With the trees I started with the trunk but after many attempts and iterations it still didn't look natural so I decided to take a break and make the leaves and branches which was a very similar process to making the ground foliage. The results of these parts went fine but as I was looking at branches I realised the way they split apart mirrored how a trunk should split and after a little digging I found out about how trees split using the fibbonacci sequence. This made me realise about how I should be doing alot more research in my projects to make sure I get a much better looking tree. The silhouettes of the trunks and modelled branches now looked much more natural.

I still hadn't cracked it yet with how the trees would be made so I still did many iterations. I was also realising when testing the trees at this point that I was putting too many planes of leaves on them and this was complete blocking any light getting through the tree creating this horrible contrast. The amount of planes would have to be removed on the next tree I would make. This situation also started making me think about how to generate the natural lighting in a forest in engine with light beams and dappled lights shining through the leaves which wasn't being achieved in the engine through just the sun lights.

I used a combination of post processing, extra directional lights that only cast light shafts and dappled lights would create a more natural setting where the light could bleed through the trees and faked bounce lights would generate an more natural ambience with deep pools of shadow where lights still don't hit. I wanted the lighting to be afternoon like so I tinted the lights orange but the shadows blue so it looked light the how light of the sun. This also generated the more Disney/Pixar look we wanted our project to have. I got lots of information on shadows and lighting from a Crytek GDC presentation and while there are tools in cryengine that are not in UE4 it still carried across. This shows again just how much research can go along way building upon the success of the trees. I have shared the information with quite a few people and this has greatly improved the work.