Week 37 – Trees

Hello everyone!

This week, we would like to demonstrate the technique we used to create vegetation in our film. Since we want a painterly style which is hard to reach with standard modeled trees, we decided to apply a texture to one-dimensional planes instead.

Obviously, the trees won’t be able to react correctly to light this way, so we are working on multiple versions of the texture (each having a different lighting) that we will switch depending on the direction of the sun in the shot. As for the shadows, they will be cheated using a second version of each tree, invisible and rotated 90 degrees, so that we can get a shadow even when light comes from the side.

One of the great advantages of this technique is that we can add a lot of trees without making our scenes too big or unstable.

So, here’s the texture :

And the result in an unlighted scene :

That’s it for now. See you next week!