How to tackle vegetation(grass) on an enviro art test?

lluc21

I've recently received an art test for an environment. I'm curious as to what would be the right way of doing things such as vegetation(mainly grass and small plants).
The test is not of a nature scene or a forest where vegetation is the main component of it, but there is a bit of grass and such and I'm wondering if it would be fine to use an already made asset (unreal preset, megascans or whatever) instead of doing it myself from scratch.

Of course I've already asked the "tester" but I'm wondering if there is an obvious expected solution to this or if it really depends on the studio/scene/workflow...
I'm asking because I've never actually tackled vegetation from scratch, and I doubt creating vegetation assets could be expected knowledge from looking at my portfolio...

Alex_J

What is the main goal? Make an entire scene? How much time do you have? Does making minor, tiny elements from scratch contribute to accomplishing the goal or make it more difficult without adding value?

Prioritize accomplishing the goal. Making games is a business, and business is war. There is no rules. 

If its realistic style and you need to make a whole scene, and it wasn't explicitly stated what sort of assets you can/can't use, I'd use megascans for any stuff like that so that you can spend more time focusing on the big picture - making a scene that is impressive.

If at the end they say that they had some arbitrary rules you had to follow and you broke them, it is fault of the test giver to fail to clearly express rules of the test.

lluc21

Alex_J said:

What is the main goal? Make an entire scene? How much time do you have? Does making minor, tiny elements from scratch contribute to accomplishing the goal or make it more difficult without adding value?

Prioritize accomplishing the goal. Making games is a business, and business is war. There is no rules. 

If its realistic style and you need to make a whole scene, and it wasn't explicitly stated what sort of assets you can/can't use, I'd use megascans for any stuff like that so that you can spend more time focusing on the big picture - making a scene that is impressive.

If at the end they say that they had some arbitrary rules you had to follow and you broke them, it is fault of the test giver to fail to clearly express rules of the test.

Thanks for responding. It is sort of like a small diorama with some big, small, and modular assets filling it. Considering what you say I think it doesn't really make sense to make everything from scratch, as my impression is that the test is more focused on building different kind of assets and composing them in a scene rather than making every single thing. I would also expect them to have a specialized team creating foliage for the artists to scatter around.

Just wanted to make sure in case there is an obvious no-go (or must go) zone when it comes to foliage and such as this is new for me.

Eric Chadwick

The last art test I did was for a world-building job, and the prompt was to use any game engine you want (though preferably theirs) and build a custom game level using existing assets, in one week.

For me it really depended on what the job description was (world builder), and what type of games they had done already (iso 3d adventure games).

Result that got me the job:
http://ericchadwick.com/img/custommap.html

And the kind of work I ended up doing:
http://ericchadwick.com/img/mmo_worldbuilding.html
and also

http://ericchadwick.com/img/robot_rising.html

Hopefully a real-world example like this can help you.

lluc21

Eric Chadwick said:

The last art test I did was for a world-building job, and the prompt was to use any game engine you want (though preferably theirs) and build a custom game level using existing assets, in one week.

For me it really depended on what the job description was (world builder), and what type of games they had done already (iso 3d adventure games).

Result that got me the job:
http://ericchadwick.com/img/custommap.html

And the kind of work I ended up doing:
http://ericchadwick.com/img/mmo_worldbuilding.html
and also

http://ericchadwick.com/img/robot_rising.html

Hopefully a real-world example like this can help you.

Hey that's cool! Luckily this is a smaller scene, and it's not that focused around forest/trees/vegetation. I've asked them and they said that it's fine to use extra, ready made plants and such to fill in the scene, but the majority of assets and textures should be made by me.
It's a prop/environment artist position in the end so it makes sense to test composition as well as asset creation skills.

Ashervisalis

I think you're in luck: grass is really easy to make. There are plenty of tutorials on how to make grass for a game engine. It usually boils down to spending half an hour modeling/placing grass in clumps in your modeling software, baking that down to an opacity map (you could add a colour ramp in to each blade at this point and bake out a colour ID map as well), putting that opacity map on a plane and cutting around the grass so the plane has less area where there is no grass. Then, bending and duplicating that plane a few times to make a cluster. Then voila, you got your grass cluster to spread around your environment.

Also, check out this tutorial;

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z4v5N

lluc21

Ashervisalis said:

I think you're in luck: grass is really easy to make. There are plenty of tutorials on how to make grass for a game engine. It usually boils down to spending half an hour modeling/placing grass in clumps in your modeling software, baking that down to an opacity map (you could add a colour ramp in to each blade at this point and bake out a colour ID map as well), putting that opacity map on a plane and cutting around the grass so the plane has less area where there is no grass. Then, bending and duplicating that plane a few times to make a cluster. Then voila, you got your grass cluster to spread around your environment.

Also, check out this tutorial;

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z4v5N

Mmh... this is very interesting. I'll definitely give a go to the grass plane thing. The second workflow looks very good but definitely too time consuming for me considering that the deadline is this monday (plus I don't really need that much foliage variety, just a few clumps of grass here and there and maybe something else to break uniformity...)

Thanks for the input, hopefully I'll be able to present something decent. I may or may not have gone overkill on a few assets that have taken way more time than I'd like...

Ashervisalis

Good luck man, let us know how the art test results go