Technical Art
Tree Resource
*responsible for all modeling and texturing seen above
For Settlers of K'tah, one of the resources that can be harvested is wood, which we decided to represent with a small forest of pine trees. For each "resource tile" of the game board, a hexagon-shaped piece is fully modeled in Maya and imported as one complete asset into UE4.
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Below is an early concept sketch I created to help our team figure out what the overhead view of the game might look like.
As with all of the resources in the game, one of our biggest concerns was keeping the poly count low in order to keep the game running smoothly. LOD's for certain models are switched out, but I also chose to use opacity masks to construct the pine tree material. The opacity masks use textures to suggest that the trees have more detail than they actually do.
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On the left is a picture of one of my tree models in Maya with no texture, and on the right are models with texture. As you can see, the geometry itself is made up of simple planes, but with the added texture there is an illusion of tiny individual pine needles.
This was accomplished by taking a png of a pine tree branch into Photoshop and masking out the image in order to create an alpha channel, resulting in the following two texture images that were used to make the tree material.
I made a masked material in UE4 and attached the first image to the material's base color and the second to it's opacity mask. However, when the material was added to the tree models, the trees ended up looking like this, with an ugly white outline around all of the branches.
I figured out this was due to the color image's white background. Even though it did not appear to be an issue in Photoshop, the alpha mask still allows the background to show through around the edges. I fixed this issue by simply replacing the background with a green one, similar to the color of the branch itself.
After that, I just replaced the material's base color with the new image, and the trees turned out just how I wanted them. I also made a second variation of the base color just to add a little more variety.
