Hi everyone,
As I believe I had mentioned before, I had asked Tom to go over our old art files and bring them in line with the standards we’d established since their creation - with some unexpected benefits I want to talk about today.
Without going on a long explanation, I had mentioned before that many of our game files had been developed over years, leading to some having been created with completely different techniques and standards than others. Considering my ongoing efforts to bring things in line with our current standards, I had asked Tom to go over the old assets and modernise them accordingly.
As a result, however, we were able to create two big improvements for the foliage in general: more consistent normals, and windmapping for the tree trunks of foliage.
The first of these is a result of reapplying a new technique to old foliage. While our newest foliage already had fairly consistent normals, some of the old trees still had their branches with normals coming out at right angles, leading to a much less natural look. With the update, the foliage overall will look more consistent and natural, and less jarring in terms of the lighting.
The second improvement comes from moving the windmapping from a texture based approach to a vertex based approach. With this, we can now also add wind to our tree trunks, making them sway together with the branches. This is of course a nice visual improvement, as it adds to the world feeling more alive, and since we are building this from the ground up, it has allowed me to also get more control over the wind in general - making it consistent across the world, with pockets of stronger and weaker winds aligning much better.
It will still be some time before all of this has been updated and I will upload the changes - but we are getting a little closer every week.
Until next week!