Beyond The Gate...

On the first week of beyond the gate project, I entered the project with really any idea on what it was I intended to create, which meant I spent the first few days of the week just gathering my thoughts, although at the time it felt like I was wasting time, I hoped in the long run it would save me time, knowing exactly what it was I wanted to do.

I started looking at reference of forests, specifically Japanese forests to fit the theme of the wall that was given as a starting point; I liked the idea of including tree houses in the style of Japanese architecture. I immediately knew this was ambitious but decided to proceed in fleshing out the level and figured I could come back to it and scope down the scale of things later on it if it becomes too much to handle. I did this very quickly and begin creating a modular kit to build the tree houses, fortunately I didn’t spend too much time on them as after I had put them in engine and blocked out a small tree house environment as a demonstration I soon realised it was too much and by cutting it out I could focus on improving my foliage which I was beginning to worry about.

I hadn’t really worked on foliage that much since my first year at university, over the holidays I had looked into software like speed tree and had even made a few trees, however I was massively struggling with trying to optimise my tree down to an appropriate tri count whilst still retaining its density, every time I tried baking down my leaves and branches to what I believe is referred to as a “frond”? They just seemed to appear really flat.

For next week I hope to have some more work done on my foliage as of right now it feels really sparse and not varied enough, to make matters worse, without the modular tree houses my foliage has become the main focus of the whole entire level, I almost feel as if I have to make it better to justify ditching the tree houses to focus on that. I’ve also decided to scale my level down further and it’s still feeling too big, with a couple of technical issues ive been having with this engine file I’m contemplating switching over to a whole new engine file to focus on a much smaller scale.