Rumble in the jungle: Totally Enormous Alive Plants.

Once all the major props were done I moved on to modelling the plants for this scene and the other scenes uv unwrapping as a went and passing the uv's over to Emma to texture. Below is a general build up of the scene, starting with the key plants and trees. One of the biggest mistakes I initially made was not instancing the plants when I duplicated them, but I later corrected this and saved a lot of time.

 The best and funnest part about modelling the plants was that simon gave me free reign bar a 500 polygon count limit, which for a few plants had to be extended to 1000 polygons. On the most part they were below 300-400 polygons most of the time and with the use of alpha channels the shapes could be kept as planes to save further on poly count. If I had more time and more freedom with poly count I could have given some of the plants more thickness and definition, adding more detail to the trees and maybe even rigging all of them if time would allow which would have been nice to give a more organic feel to them. Below is a few breakdowns of some of the plants I modelled and uv unwrapped, which Emma in turn textured.

Lastly once the majority of the plants had been modelled, I layed them out throughout the scene. I also split the scene up into a proxy, props and plants set of layers to make things flow easier. Below shows the scenein smooth mesh, wireframed layers and textured. I also started to add simons plants that he modelled and textured into the scene to add more diversity.

 Below lastly shows the majority of the campscene with textures, the various layers down the right hand side and the outliner all cleaned up. Due to time constraints I had to move on to the next scene and leave the rest of the texturing to simon the chief texture artist.

In the next blog post I will briefly cover the dynamics on the tent mesh, tent door, flag and mooring line.