The Forest

Created on: 26/07/2022
Worked on by: Thomas Lower

This forest is built entirely procedurally - in terms of both model and texture. It is built within the procedural system brought in by Blender 3 (this specifically was built in version 3.1)

Components

Grass

Starting with the grass, this is generated by building a single blade of grass from a Bezier curve with a gradient at the top and bottom to create the idea of the grass getting thinner and thicker based on the location on the blade. Each blade is then pulled into a clump of 5 blades, all of which are then placed onto the ground model through 2 procedural maps, a noise texture to place it randomly, and a Musgrave texture to invent a sense of ‘patchiness’, allowing it to more accurately simulate real grass.

Trees

The trees then are generated with a similar idea in mind as the grass, just much thicker. And the initial branches in a similar method as well just without the Musgrave patchiness and the noise rapped around the trunk rather than the ground. However, the branches after that are generated differently. They use a system of recursion where they continue to place instances of themselves however every time an instance of itself is created, the chance of the next instance being a leaf rather than a branch increases until up to around 6 instance levels where it is guaranteed that all branches are leaves. This pseudo-randomness further pushes the element of photorealism by simulating the logic of real trees.

Water

The water is the final component of this stage. It is generated using a second Musgrave texture which determines plots to lower the ground, underneath the ground layer is a 4 dimensionally textured (for the effect of flowing water) block of water that is only visible when the map lowers the ground to below that level.

Result