I feel like I have the creation of buildings in Blender for Godot figured out well enough.
The next thing is plants. One of the main planets in #IridiumMoons is a dense forest environment, so I am going to need a shitton of plants.
Figuring out how to do that without spending the next 3 years modelling trees and not making the game run like Crysis is going to be a journey.
Or I could just not, and use the Tree3D plugin, where I only have to select a bark and leaf texture and can move sliders to change any parameter.
I really like the idea of having everything in my game be hand made like the ancients did in the late 1900s.
But I also like the idea of maybe having the first chapter released in the next 5 years. Making alien forest plants by choosing which textures to use and the size and arrangement of branches is still my own personal creation.
@donorzero Nobody is typing 1s and 0s.
Everything is either tools or assets.
I made a tree.
It was really easy.
And would have been 10 times faster if all the advice on the subject wasn't youtube videos that either blast music with no explanation, have the volume set to 3%, or are compressing a 5 minute explanation into less than 60 second for the lulz, which means you have to unpause-pause-rewind 5 seconds-unpause-pause constantly.
And the rule holds: Everything is way easier and faster than I thought.
This is still a very sad Nordmann fir, but the complete production process is working.
Using vertex groups and weight paint to tell the particle system where to put the most branches and which size the branches should have is brilliant. So easy to use.
Next challenge: Create a woodland scene to show off by Saturday night.
@yora Fortunately, you really don't need a lot of trees and plant types to make a convincing forest. Not that you need to go lean or anything as I know the foliage is an important part of world design, but some of the late 90's classics got away with like less than a dozen tree types.
Morrowind has many, many plants for alchemy that are regional and what not, but there's like what, 30 types of them total?
@justdaveisfine Yeah, just with scale and rotation there's already a lot getting done to hide repetition.
And with a complex bark texture, very simple trunk and branch geometry doesn't look like straight lines and smooth surfaces.
I found a really cool pack of leaf and shrub sprites that I think are all based on photos, but mostly from less recognizable plants. Just combining them as they are with interesting tree trunks could already look quite exotic.
Yora
Donor Zero
Dave?