Trout Priest - The Chapel Garden

With only a couple more "days" left, I had another art pass, as  treat. This time, filling out the landscape with foliage.

I made lots and lots and lots of foliage for Flock. I love it.

I have also played lots and lots of Elden Ring, and something that I really like is the trees! You can't really tell during regular gameplay, but if you stop and look carefully, they function as a cluster of billboards. 

It’s pretty great, and not something I’ve seen (or at least noticed) before! I've been wanting to try this since I first emerged into Limgrave. On Flock, we used the tried-and-true Cluster of quads with remapped normals approach. But for Trout Priest I wanted to give this billboard effect a try!

This is something I have made in UE before, but not Unity. Following this tutorial, I now have some nice camera-following quads. I also added some wind controls, so while the trees won't be as swaying as they do in Flock, I think a little leaf rustling will do wonders for atmosphere.


Hey look at that! The desired effect. But, ugh! The shading is nasty! The leaf quads still need to be, uh, reminded on what their normals are. Without using a normal donor spheroid in Blender, I tried the technique used for terrain foliage and set the normals to just up.


For a very small game like this, this approach is more than enough, I think. Something I would like to try at some point is pivot caching as show in this video, where individual quads are given vertex colours to offset their positions and rotations. Clever stuff, but beyond the scope of this little project.



After adding in some mini branches to help fill out the volume and add detail, it's getting closer! One final touch, adding some depth to the leaf texture by varying the tone of the leaves really just finishes it. The extra detail closer to the middle helps to fill out the volume of the tree, as well.




And here the new leaves look in-motion!

I have also added more grass, flowers and pebbles. Overall, I am very happy with how Trout Priest is looking! Amazing how a few small details can really elevate the visuals. Another detail on the ground is the hard-edged blobs of mud on the terrain. This is done by running noise through a threshold filter on the terrain shader.


(please excuse the low gif quality, itch's upload limit is small)