Hi guys,
welcome to my first Sons of Valhalla Dev-blog! This month I mainly worked on my online presence. So the Steam page is finally live and you can now also find me on IndieDB and GameJolt.
Besides that I worked on a lot of little things regarding the game and one of them is how I bring life into trees. I'm going to show you how it works in todays dev blog.
First of all, I needed a tree like this one:
This tree is beautiful but if it had some movement it would be even more beautiful to look at. So I took a wind shader from Unity (you can find it in the Lost Crypt demo) to make the tree vibrate.
Because the shader is on the entire tree, the trunk and treetop move at the same time.
Then I decided to divide the tree into individual parts, so I can equip each part with a different wind speed. This will make the tree look more realistic because the entire treetop will not move evenly.
After the split I put the parts back together and gave each part a different wind speed.
I think the result is really impressive.
To make the tree fit into the background, I created a rim color mask for all parts. With the wind shader it is possible to transfer the light color of the scene onto the tree rim and it looks as if light is shining through the rim. Very cool!
Because the tree sometimes loses a few leaves, we definitely had to have a particle effect here.
The end result is highly impressive, right?
That's how I make trees dancing in Sons of Valhalla! If you haven't already, please add SOV to your wishlist. I'd really appreciate your support!
See you in the next dev blog episode!