Modeling foliage in Maya

Within the game, foliage plays a big role in the environment, it’s a key indicator of the passing of time, as well as it makes the environment much more flush and full. What I’ve done today was create a few assets that add to the environment, these are falling tree assets these assets will be used as obstacles for players to avoid. For example, one tree will shake and act as if it is about to fall, and once a player gets close to said actor in engine it will fall damaging the player or if it lands on sheep causing mass death within the herd. Going about creating the falling tree assets was different for me because I haven’t made multiple types of foliage before, but hey I must learn some time. After multiple attempts of trying to use a cylinder primitive and not getting anything that looked decent I decided to use a CV curve to make a base that I would extrude off from and it looked good for what I needed.  I repeated this process for the branches and used planes for the leaves, once done I UV’d the branches and tree base and now I am currently texturing the trees in substance painter 2. Here are some screenshots of my current progress.

If you would like to see more of my work please visit my site at jasonsthomas.net.

Signing off Environment artist 

Jason Thomas.