ABSTRACT
While creating trees, plants, and rocks is not a huge challenge, they are organic (i.e., characterized by unique and somewhat random details/ features) and can take a bit of time to create. In addition, you have to do a lot of work with the alpha channel to make the foliage look realistic. Inevitably, you end up going through a complex number of steps to separate a tree branch from its background. I think it is much faster, and you get a better result, creating these assets by hand. Even if you can’t paint, there are numerous tools that allow for the painting, and assembly, of these assets. We will examine the following applications in this chapter:
• TreeMagik G3
• Plant Life
• SpeedTree
• Caustics Generator
• Deep Paint 2.0
Now that we have our terrain in place, we need to add trees, plants, and rocks. Then, we need to fill it in with water and cover it with a sky. Because the environment is a jungle, we have to develop some really lush and green vegetation. When time comes to develop the plants and trees for an environment, many like to be 100% botanically correct, and others do
what looks good to them. This is a game, so I tend to do what looks good, but there is nonetheless a minimum level of accuracy you want to have. For instance, jungle plants tend to be green and broad leafed, not brown and spiky. No matter how you try and color-correct it, a cactus is going to look out of place in a jungle. You don’t have to have a degree in botany; just gather some good reference pictures of jungles from the Internet.
