The next stage of my environments creation was also what I had anticipated to be the trickiest: the surrounding forests. I figured this would be the main problem due to a variety of factors such as the number of trees and how to create a convincing forest. My original plan was to use some of the pre-made trees in 3ds max to create a forest. Although this was when the idea of billboarding and alpha maps were suggested by our lecturer. Billboarding and decals was the perfect answer to create my forest; as I could create one layer of 3d trees before using decals behind to create an illusion of a dense forest.
I started off on a small scale with only a few tree and some placeholder planes for decals. The image below shows my early progress at placing the trees around my building. This approach of layering the trees in front of the decals created an illusion of a bigger forest, exactly what I needed.
I started off on a small scale with only a few tree and some placeholder planes for decals. The image below shows my early progress at placing the trees around my building. This approach of layering the trees in front of the decals created an illusion of a bigger forest, exactly what I needed.
Afterwards I upped the increased bother the number of trees and the number of planes for the decals to create a enclosed space around the tower. I also started to trim of the edges of the landscape as it was unnecessary due to it being hidden behind the trees.