Growing Trees Part 2

Trees are pretty interesting when you stop and look at them. Given a set of rules and processes, these things appear out of the ground and create endless variations of the same basic forms. What’s been really satisfying, is how closely some of the shapes I’ve been generating in Blender this week match some of the trees on my lunchtime walk to the shop. It’s also quite possible I’ve been looking at trees too much.

After the initial implementation of the SCA-based add-on, I’ve been able to expand the core functionality to include additional rules and more importantly, actually generate usable meshes.

September Meadow

In an effort to avoid massive brain dumps at the end of the week, I’ll be posting concept art as it happens.

So here’s a mid-week update with the latest mood painting for a meadow in September, mostly likely where the game begins.

First Concept Art

The tree generator is progressing nicely, with the focus this week on generating the mesh and extending the core algorithm with additional rules.

But there’s only so much maths I can fit in my brain, so I’ve ended the week with a painting session in Krita. Here’s the first piece of concept art – a mood sketch for one of the ‘roost’ locations:

Growing Trees

Work has begun on the flight model prototype, with the bird animated and flapping about in Unity now. In addition to starting on actual gameplay, I’m also looking into several aspects of the environment modeling pipeline. Specifically this week: trees.

Trees will form a major part of the environments you’ll be flying about in, so I need to be able to create a lot of variety reasonably quickly. They are also one of the more suitable things for procedural modeling, and while there are some existing scripts, they’re not really suited to my purpose, so I’ve started work on a tree generator addon for Blender.

Getting Animated

This week has been all about getting the animation rig together, ready to get the bird flying. Along the way, also finding the answer to one of Blender’s easy-to-trip-over technical limitations – the Cyclic Dependency Update.

The animation rig is a fairly light-weight skeleton that sits over the exported deformation skeleton, driving it with constraints. There’s nothing particularly special about the setup – the spine and neck use Spline IK controllers, and bone groups and custom shapes are used to make it a bit prettier.