Organic Growth

Hey! Long time no see

During the latest weeks, I have been working on the terrain and trees. 

For the terrain, I used a fairly simple pipeline, which takes the heightmap created in unity, and applies distortion and erosion. It also outputs a splatmap which automatically applies the textures once in unity.

I also created 3 textures for the terrain, which I'm not very happy with for now, it's something to improve later.

For the trees, I used the Houdini L-system to generate a bunch of trees following the same rules, inspired by Beksinski work

Houdini auto-unwrap the trunk geometry. I added some planes, which are cut out using a simple texture I painted in substance painter.

I also created two substance materials: one for the trunk and one for the foliage.

The cut out texture also intervenes in the base color, adding those yellows part on the edge of the foliage.

Hi everyone! 

This week I mainly worked on the scene mood to be closer to the Beksinski aspect. I also refine some blockout shapes and change the ratio for a large 2.35:1 which is more impactful for this type of environment

Here is some blockout objects

The bone tree (on the right) topology is totally cursed but it does the job for a blockout

Hey! First update.

I made several blockout to see what I was aiming for.

Most of them lack a sense of vastness, but it helps me figure out the topology and the mood I want (especially the first one)

Here is the blockout I choose. Wider, a better composition, enough room to make the props I want and a large landmark. But the mood is not good yet, I'll work on it later.

I'll push it further this weekend.

Concept:

The environment I want to create is one of a dimension never explored by man. In this world, the vegetation has evolved in a much more anthropomorphic way.

Trees are lung-like, roots are like veins, and fungi sometimes form a skin.

The vegetation seems to have become like the organs of an open body.

All images in this first article are from Zdzisław Beksiński

Beksinski is a huge reference here. I want to recreate the almost organic vegetation that is often found in his work. That ivy that grows like veins, those mushrooms that look like lungs, or the kinds of bones that seem to have grown by herself

Technique:

I will mainly use procedural means for this environment, using Houdini and Substance Designer to create complex foliage and minerals and partially procedurally arrange them in a huge and open world

As I'm familiar with it and for the Houdini sync it provides, I will use Unity as the real-time engine for this project.

My main goal with this engine is to immerse the viewer by giving life to the objects created procedurally with shader coding. Vegetation that moves in the wind, veins-like roots which seem to carry some fluids, fungi resembling lungs that breathe.