Shrub Generator

A few weeks ago I was feeling the need to do some art, it’s something I don’t get much opportunity to do but always love when I have the time. Texture painting is probably my favourite part and I've always had a thing for hand painted/low poly stuff and I have a pretty huge collection of tutorials and reference on pintrest for it.

So I found something simple on my pintrest (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/301037556320070447/).

Process:

I modelled up the plane in 3dsMax, it's really just a plane with an extra vert in the centre which allows a bit of a pyramid shape.

I painted a single leaf and flower on my Galaxy Note, my favourite part of this process was actually that the work was smart rather than labour intensive, rather than painting more I modified that single leaf and flower in photoshop, used layers and adjustments, and easily created a bunch of variation and different copies of the texture.

Intitially I made some shrubs just by placing the planes and it worked fine, but I decided it’d be a bit tedious making a bunch of them.

So instead I wrote a system to generate shrubs based on parameters. I got it working but running on start was annoying and I felt some parameters could be more user-friendly, so I wrote a custom inspector.

There were some unusual bugs (there still are a few) but it’s nice to have produced something from scratch that was so involved in both art and tech fields and even considering its UI/UX in engine, I definitely think I'd like to go about making some more Unity tools in future.