[Unity] Forest treehouse environment
Hi all! I have started work in the last little while on a new personal project. My goal is to make a cool treehouse in Unity that can be walked around in, surrounded by a forest environment. The setting is meant to be modern day, but low tech. Kind of like a hippie's house in the woods with lots of cool furniture and small objects. Here's some of the reference I'm using to give you an idea:
For texturing I'm trying to do a hand painted style, but with a little more detail than I usually do for hand painting. As usual for me, I'm going for strong, highly saturated colours. For the lighting in Unity, I'm going to experiment around with some different solutions. I want to be able to use light to give the forest some depth and add atmosphere. Anyway, here's a look at the first attempts I did on texturing some pieces:
I've also started blocking a few ideas out to try and decide what kind of modular pieces I'm going to need:
I'm working on this with little bits of free time I have during the week, so progress is likely to be a pretty slow, but I'm keen to get some feedback and push this environment as far as I can since I'm just doing it as a purely personal work.
For texturing I'm trying to do a hand painted style, but with a little more detail than I usually do for hand painting. As usual for me, I'm going for strong, highly saturated colours. For the lighting in Unity, I'm going to experiment around with some different solutions. I want to be able to use light to give the forest some depth and add atmosphere. Anyway, here's a look at the first attempts I did on texturing some pieces:
I've also started blocking a few ideas out to try and decide what kind of modular pieces I'm going to need:
I'm working on this with little bits of free time I have during the week, so progress is likely to be a pretty slow, but I'm keen to get some feedback and push this environment as far as I can since I'm just doing it as a purely personal work.
Replies
I plan to get a lot of ivy/leaves/vegetation growing around to help cover the weird intersection points of the constructed elements and the natural trees. Stay tuned!
I'm working on building a tool for Unity to let me create trees in this style from splines in-editor, which is going to save a ton of time down the road when I start making intertwining trunks and roots that weave in and out of the modular pieces that I'll be assembling in-editor. More on that later!
That tool sounds like a great idea.
I'm hoping to take on my first Unity project soon. I'll be focusing on hand painted texture work. This project has made me even more eager to start it.
All the best!
Have you looked into unity's built in tree creator?
You can draw you own splines with it too.
Don't know if you can have foliage growing off of it like you're doing here though.
I did check out Unity's tree creator. It's kind of neat, but I decided to write my own system anyway just so I could customize it a lot more easily. For this scene I want to do a certain kind of tree with a certain foliage setup, so I wanted something that could do that specific task well
So this screenshot might not look like it's any different than the last one, but the trees you see now are created in editor using my new script, they're not made in maya. The trunk is an extruded cylinder along a spline, and the foliage is 2 premade models (a flat horizontal chunk of leaves and an upright quad for the sides of the trunk) that get randomly placed along the trunk spline. You can see all the settings I built into the script to allow customizing the trees in the editor.
Done with the tree system for now, time to work on some more actual models to populate the area with and keep the overall scene moving forward!