

Video Game Foliage - n3on_net
http://video-game-foliage.tumblr.com/

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patio11
There is probably some artist whose life's work is being The Tree Guy. Art
direction called for a Japanese maple to be in the background of that shot
and, by God, TTG made it so. Can't render scenes in a forest? Call in TTG --
he can take a clipper to the topiary and knock off 80% of the polys off a
stockart tree without taking away 1% of it's tree-ness. When the companies
which make automated tree-production software (n.b. this is A Thing [+] and it
costs several thousand dollars a license IIRC) needed recommended parameters
for aesthetically pleasing trees, who do they call? TTG, that's right. Give
him 30 minutes and a high-end PC to do simulated annealing and he'll come up
with a new species of tree, unknown to nature, which nonetheless would fool
botanists because it looks like it _should_ exist, somewhere, maybe in wet
regions of Laos.

I really feel for video game artists. In some ways, they're like the medieval
painters of our age -- the ones who would paint gorgeous frescoes in parts of
cathedrals which were _planned_ to be occluded in further construction,
because if that part of the wall was unpainted God would see it. I walked into
a room in a Final Fantasy game once, blew through it in 7 seconds, then went
back and thought "Wait, somebody -- heck, probably a team of someones -- spent
_most of a year of their life_ getting this room ready for those seven
seconds."

It's inspiring, in a way, and also makes me triply glad that I am not in the
game industry.

[+] Edit: Representative example:
[http://www.speedtree.com/](http://www.speedtree.com/)

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Kiro
Also linked in the blog:
[http://videogametumbleweeds.tumblr.com/](http://videogametumbleweeds.tumblr.com/)

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joveian
Excellent blog topic :). I really enjoyed the trees and day/night simulation
in A Valley Without Wind.

