Environment Props for Game

Making of Environment Props

This is my process for making the trees, rocks and other environment props for my game The Wandering Witch, a project for one of my uni classes.

I created the structure for these elements using Maya and textured them in Substance painter.

I began  with the tree trunks, creating a variety of interesting shapes.

Next I worked on the leaves, I originally started with a single mesh creating  a rough shape  and then wanted to separate out the faces to add texture.  I decided to delete over half of them to reduce the polys and as I was scaling these faces up, the extra faces were unnecessary.

For texturing I took inspiration from a video showing how to achieve an anime style appearance, by creating a multi layered texture, which was easy to change for different coloured elements (such as the rocks). (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8llGEKIQT0&t=8s).  

For the leaves I hand drew a series of different shaped patches that I could use to align the leaf planes on in Maya. I was able to size and stack the individual planes on the patches, selecting the darker areas for the bottom and the lightest patches for the top of the tree.

The pine tree leaves were grouped by relative size and textured before refining their  placement and rotation back in Maya.

The bushes, log , tree stump and rocks were made in similar ways.

This is the final environment of the island with all the trees and props in place.