Take a Walk in a Stylized Pacific Northwest Forest Visualized in 3D

Introduction

I’ve been in the gaming industry for over a decade now, having the opportunity to work with numerous different scenarios of world creation for players. I contributed to environment teams for both indie and AAA titles. In my spare time, I love doing environment game art projects that can convey the essence of natural tranquility.

Inspiration & References

I’ve been fortunate to live in the Pacific Northwest for about 7 years now. It’s impossible not to be inspired whenever stepping out into the forests, coastlines, and mountains this place has. For this particular piece, I wanted to take some time to delve into the intricate complexities of how the tree and plant species grow and how the whole composition of a conifer forest can be understood. I hopped to that feeling of enticing unknown space these forests have. I used a combination of references for different tree and plant species. Also, I was going out into the real forests and had an opportunity to take the time to observe them in real-life. 

Composition

When doing any natural scene, at first, I determine the geology of the layout. I decide how the mountains, hills, and valleys should be arranged according to the player’s level. I created some basic hills, mountains, and river valleys for the background around the playable space that would be filled in with skybox versions of tree clusters. After that, I like to lay in the large boulders in the gaming space and sculpt the landscape terrain around them. It is important to pay attention to how soil will erode down a hill or mountain slope. For the ground, I wanted to create a clump of masked forest floor foliage textures separated from the tiling texture on the ground. This would fix the problem with repetition and add an extra layer of depth and form to the ground.  

Retopology & Unwrapping

Fortunately, the UV unwrapping process is quite straightforward for foliage modeling. However, I’ve found that the most effective method to maintain control of how local color values are distributed across a cluster of foliage such as a tree canopy or a bush is setting up a pipeline. The pipeline should use multiple UV channels covering different gradient forms of the mesh. 

For example, I have one channel that covers the individual leaf cards. In the second UV channel, there is a side view projection of the entire tree or a bush to create a gradient from the bottom to the top of the mesh. There are several other ways to get this effect such as using world space texture coordinates in Unreal or using a Runtime Virtual Texture pipeline. However, I choose to use this method because it is clear and allows to modify assets for each mesh.

Texturing

I prefer to create all my foliage textures in ZBrush, then render them with a flat color, normal, and depth or curvature pass with ZBrush’s BPR render. After that, I open them in Photoshop and set up the channels I need for the master foliage material. The part requiring special attention is sculpting the leaf and branch clusters. Also, I keep an eye on the silhouette to see the interaction between positive and negative space. It is important to keep in mind how it will look once this cutout shape is replicated on a large number of overlapping foliage cards. I also try to keep the values very simple and subtle. If I’m indicating any kind of detail such as variety in the colors of the leaf textures, I ensure to make them defiant in shape and subtle in value and color. 

Assembling the Final Scene

For the final scene, where the “player” would travel through, I looked at the natural erosion patterns when I was out on the trails in the Pacific Northwest. Fortunately, natural clear pathways occur at the base of eroded hill slopes that go down the mountain. One of the big challenges was providing the sense of a truly dense thick forest without having to rely on a huge background with hundreds of distant trees. At the same time, I didn’t want to make it too dense, like a wall-looking cluster of trees and bushes. One of the ways to combat this is to know how to arrange a group of mid-range trees and bushes to show depth behind them with negative space. At the same time, knowing how to place them allows you to achieve the sense of a dense forest extending far into the background with only a few. 

Lighting

The lighting for this scene was simple. It involved using the sunlight, skylight, and sky atmosphere settings with increased absorption to give that ambient overcast effect to the sun. After that, I just put a few local spotlights in some of the composition spots to help punch up the local colors. I focused on the quality of the local colors for all my assets to make sure lighting would be simple. After that, I just tweaked the saturation in Post-Process Volume and made a LUT texture in Photoshop to add the finishing touches to the colors. 

Conclusion

For this piece, I wanted to take time and really look at the infrastructure of a forest and how the sum of its parts works together. For this reason, I wanted to focus on every asset as closely as on any other element. I was fortunate to go out on a trail again and again over the weeks and take notes on every detail I was observing. 

One thing I would tell anyone who’s starting in environment art is to try to always develop the two mindsets of observation and understanding the anatomy of everything in the world around you. Also, note how those elements make you feel and what kind of vocabulary of shape, color, value, and composition can best communicate your feelings to the viewer. 

Tyler Smith, Senior Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine