Trees, Part 2: Nature is Healing (Patreon)

Nature is healing.... until I have finished the trees' destruction effects, anyways!

Vertex Colors Driving Shader Properties

Public Service Announcement: This is your tree on vertex colors.

Here's a quick look at some technical art that goes into the trees! In my last post I have shown how I'm using a custom shader to animate the vertices, so that it looks like the foliage is moving in the wind.

To have more control over what parts of the tree are affected by this effect (and how much) I'm using vertex colors, specifically the Green channel: The greener the color is, the stronger that part of the mesh is going to move.

Additionally, I'm using the vertex color's Red channel to apply some color variation, in the vegetation shader: I can actually define 2 colors per tree material and depending on whether the vertex color has a higher/lower Red value, it's going to be closer to either one or the other color.

I'm using this color masking to add a gradient to the foliage, so it looks less uniform:

Three normal trees, the likes of which you commonly find in any public park.

In summary, I'm using the Red channel for masking colors, the Green channel for masking the wind animation, and the Blue channel for, uh, nothing.... yet.

Unfortunately Blender only shows all color channels at once, by default, which is why these don't show very well, in the top screenshot. It's probably easiest to see on the trunk: Its Red value is maxed out, all over, and then there's some green in the branches, because they will move a little in the wind. And when I say "there's some green," I mean yellow, because red and green mix to become yellow, of course.

Being Lazy. Again.

Look at them go.

Another little script I have written to help me randomize tree scales, rotations and foliage materials!

As always, I try to make the most of the few things I have, so adding variation like this makes it less obvious that the trees are mostly the same, heh.

Thanks for your support!

Working on these trees has been pretty exhausting, to be honest, but I'm really excited to see them in the city: I think they add a lot to the 'believability' of the place and I'm finally getting to what I think is the right sweet spot, in terms of level of detail.

Next, I still need to figure out how exactly the trees are going to take damage, and such: But I'll probably keep it simple, over all.