New Olive Tree

[Emma]

Hello everyone 

I’m currently working on a new olive tree model for the Erechtheion and the olive mill. It’s still a work in progress, but here are the first results. I attached the blend file down below! For the foliage, I modeled an olive branch, textured it, and turned it into a foliage card to use for the tree.

This is my first time working on a project like this, so please don’t hesitate to give feedback, I would really appreciate it!

Have a great weekend!

- Emma

OliveTrees.blend

[Emma]

P.S. I am also currently facing a problem with adjusting the normals. As you can see, it creates some strange-looking shadows. Maybe someone here has more experience with this and knows what might be going on.
 

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[nifa]

Hi,

awesome work!! I love the foliage, it looks really nice :) I also like your workflow, offers more possibilities than handpainting like some of the old models.

0 A.D. uses .dae files, which is not supported by blender since version 5 anymore. I will figure it how to exports your models and make a mod for it, so we can see how it looks ingame.

Until then, some things that came to my mind on a first glance:

1. Faces are shown in 0 A.D. only from one side. By activating backface culling or face orientation in the top right corner in the viewport you can see which face would be seen from each perspective. If you want to show faces from both side, you'd have to duplicate it, move it a little and flip the normal (Alt-N).

2. Everything should use just one texture. So ideally the tree trunk should be somewhere on the foliage texture too.

3. All meshes in 0 A.D. usually expand a little below ground for uneven terrain.

I couldn't reproduce the problem with the normals, looks fine on my pc.

For an olive orchard would be cool to display some black olives (the fruits) on it, so the player can harvest them similar to the berry bushes. But that's a gameplay decision I'll leave to someone else :D

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I think the key is to remember that for most (99%) of the game the player will see the tree from a 45 degree angle. So, to give a nice self-shadowing overlapping look, angle the foliage planes flatter (more horizontal or at least at a 45 degree angle) than you normally would. I admit not all trees currently in-game follow this rule precisely, but a the current trees have had a dozen artists over the course of 20 years.

[nifa]

Looks nice

I could open it with blender 4.5 LTS and export the .dae. Tells me there might be data loss, but so far it worked fine.

I put together the files for a mod and attached it. Can be found in the scenario editor -> actors -> olive_new. So far the 4 meshes are replications, but you can easily substitute them to test however you like.

There is also a blank alpha decal_texture, in case you want to add a decal on the ground. 

The polycount might be a little high, since each of your branches has 12 tris. On the other hand, this reduces alpha texture display. It's best to compare it to the existing trees, their polycount can be seen in atlas. As long as it doesn't go much higher, it should be fine.

If you want, you could gently bake ambient occlusion on the diffuse. For the bark the UV looks a little stretched. You can also use an existing image texture for it, as long as it is licence compatible (preferably CC0), something like this: https://download.blender.org/archive/textures/bark/

Have fun!

 

olive_tree.zip