Progress on Our Vegetation (Patreon)

Hello everyone! For today’s Patreon post, we, Chloé and Léa, are excited to show you the progress that we have made so far for the vegetation of the game!

Through the creation process, we encountered many challenges; we will be discussing these today as well. This post is for Patrons only, so please do not share it with non-Patrons. Thank you!

Our Art Direction for the Vegetation

First thing first, references! We had to figure out what we wanted for our game. We knew we wanted something stylised, but not to the point where we would greatly stray from reality. We want the players to be able to recreate their own gardens with vegetation that is recognisable.

(1) (2) (3) We are big fans of Ghibli, and luckily for us, there is a lot of great material that inspired us from their movies. Other works such as (4) Victoria Zavhorodnia’s, (5) Harry Heath’s, (6) Marterio HF’s inspired us a lot, too.

The real challenge was to compromise between the idea and the technical constraints in order to create the best result possible for the game.

Our Basic Bushes

One of the trickiest things we had to figure out was how to create fluffy and voluminous trees and bushes. When it comes to leafy plants, they have to be simplified a lot. Here’s an example:

On the left, an example of a branch: we’d have tons of leaves and then have hundreds of branches in a tree. It would be heavy to run in-game! On the right is how we simplify it. One branch becomes 2 big triangles, which is lighter for the game to run.

Once we figured out how to make our branches, we decided to tackle bushes (they are basically tiny trees!). Things didn’t quite work as we’d hoped.

V3 was fluffy, but it didn’t feel organic. We can also see the triangles we used on the bush. V6 was a bit better, but it lacked the desired fluff. V11 is our final version. Look at that fluffiness! There were a lot of iterations created.

I (Chloé) ended up developing a tool to make bush creation not only easier for us, but to also get the look we wanted.

The tool allows us to change the color of the foliage easily, and has a lot of other features! It also helps with the issues discussed previously. Colors might not be modifiable in-game because it might cause conflicts with our season system. (If you are on mobile, the GIF may not show up for you!)

Our Fluffy Trees

Next, we tackled trees. They had to be big and fluffy trees without being too heavy and make our computers catch on fire. It required a lot of work to find an in-between between style and limitations.

I (Léa) tested a lot of different looks for the foliage: very stylized and round, very artsy and plain, with and without shadows in the leaves...

From left to right: v4 foliage is very stylized and round, v11 foliage is diverse without any shadows, v18 foliage is plain without shadows, v20 foliage is diverse and has shadows.

Here is the final result for now:

The same tree, rotated, lifted, resized and recolored to look different

This latest version represents real trees more accurately, while maintaining the stylized look we wanted! The irregular silhouette will help you reuse the same tree many times without it being noticeable: change the color, lift it, rotate it, resize it, and have fun!

Our Conifers

Unlike fluffy trees, conifers have a strong structure –we had to illustrate this in our asset. If we don’t give the proper structure to the conifers, they become harder to recognize and tell apart.

While most trees have branches that go in all directions, conifers’ branches usually point either slightly downwards, or upwards.

Luckily, the creation process for the conifers went smoothly. I (Chloé) was able to figure out ways to match them nicely to the style of the leafy plants.

Our two conifers as they currently are. They, too, are fluffy – it makes me want to hug ‘em?!

Our Hydrangeas

Next, we decided to create an hydrangea. Just like conifers, hydrangeas have a specific structure. We thought that modeling the structure accurately would do the trick, but it was not quite the case!

On the left is the version which had an accurate structure. It was lackluster and bare. We ended up cheating a bit with the hydrangeas on the right to get the fluffiness we wanted and tested a few different looks.

In the end, we decided to go for more subtle textures, which made it blend much better with the rest of the vegetation.

Where Are We At Now?

Our (blood, sweat and tears) current assets.

To this day, we are still tweaking and improving things. The vegetation we just showed you is a work in progress, after all. We hope that you enjoy how things have come along! We are looking forward to showing you all more of our work in the future.

Today’s Poll – A Special Quiz!

On a slightly unrelated note, did you know conifers are near indistinguishable from one another from a distance? I (Chloé) gave this quiz to the team, and they all failed to find the intruder that’s a different species than the others! We’re curious to see if you have more of an eye for conifers than the team did.

Vote in the poll below for the conifer you believe is the odd out (species)!

Chloé and Léa, signing off!

Have a great weekend! ★~(◡ω◡✿)