The Hunt – The Environment: The Trees

The environment was the core of my job as we travel through very varied landscapes and times of day. I looked at a lot of photos of mountains and forests in different lighting conditions to get a feel of the right lighting and colours.

We did not want realistic trees with foliage as it would have been really heavy to do, knowing that I had a number of other environments to create. It also would not have fitted the aesthetic we were going for. My main influence was the trees painted by Canadian Landscape Painters called ‘the Group of Seven’.

I started by drawing concept drawings, influenced by leaves and flames. Then I made a python script that would extrude a shape along a randomly created curve to create the trunk, and use a similar process with a half sphere to create the foliage. While I got some interesting results, it was hard to get the organic feel I was looking for. I therefore used the shapes generated by my script as base and combined them together in Zbrush. This allowed me to speed up my process, as I did not have to sculpt every tree from scratch.

These trees were then unwrapped and textured in Mari. I needed to retain enough of the idea of foliage and branches, for the presence of the leaves at the end of the story to make sense. I added some 2D trees I painted in photoshop to make the forest feel denser.

The ground was really bare for a long time as one painted texture did not seem to give enough rich variations. Indeed the ground of the forest is full of pine needles, rocks, dirt, leaves, grass, moss and other elements creating a visual complexity. In order to create the same effect in our forest, I created a lot of semi abstract textures that I layered on top of my existing ground, painting an alpha channel to make them appear only at specific places.