Palm Trees & Rocks!

This week I started to make some environment assess to get a better look at what the game will look like. Making some basic rocks and vegetation seemed like a good start so I made some palm trees and rocks!

For the rocks I made a simple base mesh in 3DS MAX then started sculpting in Zbrush. Using Trim brushes along with the Orb Brush pack it was easy to get the desired look very quickly. I then used Z-Remesher to get a low poly to then export both high and low poly meshes into Substance Painter. After baking, I started to texture the rock using the curvature generator to get that edge highlight a long with the standard generic grunge (I think that's what it is called) material to get some more colour variation, it's only subtle but makes a big difference in the final outcome. Lastly I exported them as TGA (Targa) files so I could make use of the alpha channel in the metallic map as I could store the roughness there. This is the default in the Unity LWRP (soon to be changing to the Universal RP) compared to having each texture separate you instead channel pack.

To make the palm trees I started by creating the bark texture in Substance Designer. After this I made the leaf texture using Photoshop, the actual texture is a mixture of hand painted and real-world textures. The Normal map was made using the normal map filter which I feel many people skip even though it can get good results fast, especially when you know you will most likely change the texture in the future. The roughness map was simple also as it is a grey-scale version of the texture with the levels changed.