Trees!

For the outside environment I first started in Unity using the terrain tools. I sculpted a nice terrain and created rocks and mountains to fill the place out a bit. I then looked up some textures and started adding layer after layer to get a nice detailed finish. It didn't really suit the graphic style we were aiming for though so I went through a long process of changing textures. I then came to the conclusion perhaps something more simple or just one texture on it's own would do the trick but the terrain itself wasn't doing it for me. So I decided to model the whole environment in Maya instead.

When moving onto designing the outside environment I first started thinking about trees. And I wanted a fairly simple model that has a lot of character like in the toon forest pack and I came up with this.

I enjoyed creating this tree design and I took a lot of inspiration from the toon forest pack which led me to looking at the textures in Viva Piñata. All the stripy textures for the grass on the toon forest pack instantly made me think of the Viva Piñata games and I never realised that adding little patterns makes all the difference. The grass in the game is nicely decorated with little leaf-like patterns and I think it looks beautiful and quite subtle due to the colours. The use of stripes in particular reminded me of football fields and I think the colours I went for are a more exaggerated version of that. I think perhaps the colours I've used are a bit too bright though? But it's hard to tell without the lighting and effects being added on to it in Unity. It might also look out of place when me and Adam combine the environments we've both been working on but they're easy changes to make.