Trees and foliage

While working on Forza 2, I was tasked with making some trees for our Rio de Janiero track. My Art Director was so pleased with the results that he gave me the task of making the trees and foliage for the rest of the game.

One of the more interesting solutions I came up with for lighting tall grass and weeds was to use a UV Projection modifier to "push" the shadows from the lightmap on a piece of terrain up to the grass and weeds that were placed on it. Since these elements were single polygons rotated at random angles, they didn't light predictably on their own, and this provided the desired effect for no extra runtime cost.

The effect:

For The SOE_Project, we needed ultra-efficient trees that could not only be used in our urban tileset, but also in clusters of hundreds in order to make up our Central American jungle areas. I settled on a method that allows for a very high level of granular detail, using smaller, single triangle cards.

The UV strategy:

By not using every corner of the texture space, I was able to divide it into single triangle quadrants:

The modeling method:

By using single-triangle cards, I was able to make very detailed yet low-poly trees.