The life of a bumblebee

My first foliage assets and environment.

The environs

In this small environment project, you are a little bumblebee flying through cozy and lush greenery.

This was my first project where i could make lush foliage. My main focus was getting a grasp of making foliage models and textures, and how to implement them nicely in Unity.

I also learned the basics of foliage shaders for this project, with help from friends and tutorials.

The flowers

I made 3 different flowers for this project, all with 3 color variations.

They are cornflowers, poppies and foxgloves. I referenced their irl species, but did not make these models accurate. I kept them stylized and generic.

After handpainting the textures, I cut them out and modelled the planes to make a 3D mesh. This is the approach of Victoria Zavhorodnia, whose tutorial I used for the foxglove. After figuring out the workflow, I worked on increasingly harder shapes to figure out the limits of this workflow. The cornflower has a peculiar structure, and it was a fun puzzle to figure out how to make it 3D from a flat texture.

Trees and shrubs

I generated a few trees in TreeIt, but found they felt too stiff. The next few trees were modeled in Blender, and I made some fusion trees by combining my own trunks with generated leaves.

The shrubs were assembled from generated branches and re-used leaves. I recalculated the normals to make the shading more natural.

I made the trunks with blender curves to have more control over the shape. When making the shape, I payed attention to a diverse silhouette when you would rotate the tree. The generated trunks looked the same with every rotation, boring!

I handpainted the textures in Procreate and Krita. The artstyles are a bit diverse, because I was experimenting with different looks and approaches.

Grass shader

The grass shader samples the terrain texture color with a camera and gives the grass that same color. This allows for very flexible coloring with great control.

To achieve this in Unity, I used this tutorial form Binary Lunar.

I used this shader on a clover mesh to have more variation in ground covering materials.

Moodboard

The goal of the experience was to envoke the feeling of serenity, softness, and awe at the beauty of nature.

In my moodboard, I gathered images to capture the feeling of warmth i was going for, as well as style references, environment layout ideas and, of course, foliage ideas and references.