Next update is finally done! My goodness it takes a long time to setup and animate so many objects! And a very large amount of code :). At least the basic room for teleporting is done though, and it should make it easier to go around the level and see things as I’m working on them. There are also new game builds to try, but just to let anyone trying it know, having the portals in it is making the game crash sometimes because of having to render everything twice. I’ll add some options for it to make it better, but for now, you may have to play it at a lower quality setting.
Here is a video I made of everything as well:
I also added my first sound effect to the game!, which is the wind for the TeleRoom.
And there are four more spontaneous piano sessions in the game now, as well on SoundCloud here: Stream ArtOfLight music | Listen to songs, albums, playlists for free on SoundCloud
Here is the stuff I’ve been working on with the vegetation. I want to try to do as much experimenting as I can at this early stage, and figure out what will give the best results before I make the rest of the models.
First thing is I’ve been working on trying to figure out how to approach the other smaller kinds of aspen trees. As I have been studying the trees more, I’m finding that the main difficulty is trying to get the verticality in the leaves and branches. It’s not really something I had thought about before, but when looking at trees you see that the branches all come out horizontally while the leaves all fall down vertically from them, and this way that the leaves come down vertically is what makes us able to see the sun’s direct light on the tree from the ground. The difficulty is you can’t really have that very well when you’re using large planes for the branches and leaves.
From what I can tell, normally this is solved by having many different leaf planes going in random directions, but with the way you can see the branches in the winter, I don’t think that would work very well for this.
I realized too that this is the main reason that the larger trees have such a small area where you can see the light on the leaves and can look a bit splotching sometimes, because I only have the horizontal part of the branch and need to add the vertical part of the leaves as well:
So I’ve been trying to figure out some very low poly ways that I can get this leaf verticality that you can see the light hitting the leaf, especially for the trees that are down on the ground at eye level. And again, part of the difficulty is that the leaves have to be touching a branch, since you can see them growing from off the branch in Spring. Here are some leaf clusters that I have been working on with all of this in mind. The black lines are the shapes that the texture will be on when it goes on the tree. The top right clusters are made to go vertically on triangles for the large trees, while the other smaller clusters and branches are for the aspen saplings:
So far I’ve been able to get something that I think should work quite well for the almost bush like saplings. It seems to have a pretty similar profile to some of the pictures I have seen. What seems to work best is to have a quad made into two triangles that would only have three or four leaves on it, then you make the edge splitting the quad in half, higher than the other two vertices, making a V. You can see this with the bottom right clusters. Then you just keep rotating them as you go along the branch. Here is how it looks: (the vertex count includes some other meshes in the view that aren’t visible)
Other thing is I was able to figure out a better way to have the leaves disappear for the fall. I had been doing it though a texture mask that had a random value for each leaf that looked like this:
, but the problem was it was leaving bits of leaves floating in the air. So I manually assigned a color to each leaf, and now it looks like this:
The main thing to notice is the darkest leaves are in the front and will disappear last, while the brightest are in the back and will disappear first. This way it should disappear back to front and not leave any bits of leaves around.
Another thing with this fall transition is there are rings being left around the leaves as they disappear, and I finally figured out it was being caused by Unreal’s compression settings. You can see the large blocks it was creating here:
I found out though that if it’s set to a normal map compression setting, it’s higher quality and doesn’t cause these:
I haven’t tried it yet, but right now the plan is to store the mask in the Blue channel of one my Normal maps, and it should get rid of the ring around the leaves.
So all in all, once everything is implemented, the trees, and next vegetation I work on, should look quite a bit better.