I wonder if you played around with some kind of screen-space texture for the leaves.
It would probably look weird but it may have been an interesting visual direction for the trees!

Can you make these trees in unreal? I tried a lot and I could not.

Beautiful work. First you transfer the normal with the sphere, after being transferred puts in the trunk?

I thought they must first put the plans in the trunk, then transfer Vertex Normal with the sphere.

Smooth shadow in the middle of the tree is with vertex paint?

Normal Thief helps, and so does the style of the game, meaning we don’t need to show a lot of precise branch structure everywhere.

I don’t know what I was talking about, the peach should have bloomed in August, after the post… Maybe I’ll remember this year, though with any luck I can admire apple blossoms in-game by then.

There are two scripts I know of, slide normal thief and normal thief. Not sure if there is a difference, since I only ever used slide normal thief, and it seems to work perfectly. The site we found them on is this one. They are both Max scripts, but there might be something like them for Maya.

The advantage of creating custom leaf brushes in Photoshop is that I can quickly and easily paint matching texture and opacity maps for the foliage of certain trees, and control the shape, density, detail, color variation and angle of the leaves. In most cases it’s way faster (5-10 min) to just make a brush than to spend forever looking for the perfect one online.

Where could I find and apply the thief script? is it this?
Then, Did you use the script in Maya?
What’s the advantage to creating a leaf brush in photoshop?

Thanks Orsi! Your words and works are an inspiration.

Ignacio made us a great foliage shader, with a slider for what angle the planes fade in and an other for when they fade out. The great thing about our workflow is that we put everything together in Maya scenes, and it just gets exported like that to the game, by layer. So we don’t need an equivalent shader, we apply a shader to a mesh in Maya, and that is what it will be using in game.

I’m curious about the shader for the trees, I recall someone mentioning that the leaves become invisible as the surface normal becomes perpendicular to the camera. I wanted to know if the surface fades out as it comes into alignment or if there is just a cutoff, so if you view the leaves from the unflattering angle they just disappear.

Also do you have an equivalent shader in Maya or zBrush to simulate this when you work? It seems like a really cool idea to make the tree look less video gamey, but I’m just haveing a little trouble visualizing how it looks.

Thanks

The process for the trees is fairly straightforward: gather a bunch of reference to get the idea for how a certain tree could grow, build the trunk in zshperes, make an adaptive skin for it, push it around with the move tool a little to make it feel more organic, delete excess edge loops, uv and texture. If it is a bigger or more detailed tree, sculpt the detail into the trunk, then decimate it to get the faceted look our game has. For the foliage, I usually make my own leaf brush in photoshop that matches the tree to create the diffuse and opacity map for it. I use the slide normal thief script to push out the normals of a bunch of randomly placed planes out in a sphere, and apply the texture to that to make the foliage, then place it around the tree in a way that makes sense.

As for the art style, we didn’t really have a ‘concept phase’. At first we were just building the game as Shannon, the first artist, started it, but we realized that what we were getting was not very eye catching, and looked more like something that was trying to be realistic but stayed too simplistic in form and texture. When Eric and Luis joined the team, they spent about a month doing tests to see what the style could look like, and they were the ones who came up with the faceted geometry and low-noise textures. Even after the tests, though, every time someone made something new, it was a challenge to figure out how that specific thing could be done within our style constraints. Some really noisy things, like a rough stone fence or a rusted heap of metal, were a real challenge, but it was usually just a matter of figuring out where to put the detail that just hints at the materiality of the thing.

The Witness’s art style looks beautiful and seems to have little detail as you say. As a game artist myself, I’m trying to sort out when a game’s art style comes together. When did the witnesses style feel like it was coming into play easily in comparison to its first art style concept?

I truly appreciate you taking the time to share your beautiful trees. The images are truly inspirational, and I for one would love a wallpaper of the eucalyptus forest. I have a few questions if you could spare another moment.

Do you have a specific process that you run though when you make these beauties? I would love to learn how you made some of these.

The Witness’s art style looks beautiful and seems to have little detail as you say, but when did as a game artist myself, I’m trying to sort out when a game’s art style comes together. I figure it’s something that is sorted out during the concept phases, but tested during production?

Thanks for your wonderful post Orsi,
EJ

The models look great, but as an Australian, the eucalyptus looks a bit off. It might be because they look generally too lush. I get the impression of willow leaves, rather than eucalypt leaves. In my mind, gum trees are usually much more scraggly, but that’s in Australian drought, not the island.

I think that the loose dead bark around the outside is important to the image, but I understand that the styling needs to be minimal.

Anyway, best of luck with this. Loving what you’ve done so, Orsi.

This article here says that it is a launch title.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/the-witness-confirmed-as-a-ps4-launch-title-6404212

I know you said you were going to fix them up, but as they stand, the eucalypts aren’t giving me much of a eucalypty feel. They look too lush. I’m used to eucalypts being dry, with lignified leaves.

That’s my contribution. Everything else is wonderful.

Regarding these beautiful trees, I am hoping there is some moment in the game where the wind blows all the leaves off of a tree, very dramatically! That’d be spooky.

But upon re-reading my question & seeing PlayStation 4 mentioned,
it only just now occurred to me — a 2 1/2 year old tablet [iPad 2-$399] costs the same as
an absolutely cutting edge SOTA gaming console [PlayStation-$399]!

Unbelievable …. lol

We plan to have the game run on the iPad 2, but this isn’t finalized. (We need to see how well the game runs on the iPad, in the end, before making a final decision about which models of the iPad we will support).

However, on the iPad the game won’t be displaying the same geometry as on a high-end machine like the PS4. The iPad would be running a lower-poly version of the game with simpler shaders. However, as time goes on and iPads get more powerful, we can eventually reach parity with what gets shipped on the PS4 and PC.

Though I have no previous industry experience to compare, I think the great thing about Jon as a director is the huge amount of trust he has in his artists. He has some very specific requirements about the art style where it relates to the gameplay, and he is never shy about letting us know if something is not quite working for him, but beyond that, he seems to trust us to make the game beautiful. As long as we manage to fulfill those requirements and come up with something good-looking, he tends to let us work out the details. This has been working fairly well, because the artists are very passionate about the project and the environments we are creating. It’s like an upward spiral, since the more freedom he gives us, the more personal love we can put in the project, and things just turn out better.

From what I understand, the clusters-of-triangles-in-a-bowl thing was something Shannon used back when the engine couldn’t handle opacity maps. Now we usually use bunches of rectangular planes, modify the normals, and use Ignacio’s foliage shader, which lets us control the fade in and fade out of planes based on how they are facing the camera. We sometimes use this shader for grass as well.

Second thing:
I live in Liguria, Italy. Through my window I see olive threes. Here they are everywhere. Your trunks are great. They are correctly gnarled. I feel I have to give you an advice about the foliage. The olive leaf has a peculiar characteristic: its faces have different colors and different light behavior, so when you move or/and they are moved by wind they change color. The lighter part reflects the light and results very bright under the sun.
I searched for a video, I didn’t find a great one, but here it is video!
Some pics: olive threes, olive leaves.

I hope what I’ve written was clear and useful.

8)

I can’ wait to play the game on PS4, Braid was amazing and this… it will be just fucking amazing !!!

Can you do some red tree ? Like a blood tree or something ?

None of our trees lean to the left. And birds who land in them can only fly with their right wings which simultaneously drop nuts for squirrels.

I mean it. Change the camera perspective. See what I mean.

Thing is, I’ve been 100% faithful to my iPad 2 lo these 2 1/2 years.
Well, there was that one thing in Cabo — but she meant nothing …
Anyhoo, I’m wondering if my stalwart primary computational device can handle all of the graphical
& audioacal splendiferousness that is “The Witness”?

Or, upon loading of the splashscreen, will wisps of smoke start curling out the back? lol

I really love the Eucalyptus trees too. I’ve seen a few or two in my hometown Australia especially in the ‘bush’ or ‘outback’ as we call it. I guess that’s our term for forest except with lots of Eucalyptus trees. And you are going to make them even better? Wow! Thank you, it is so nice to have a little bit of home in the game… Makes me feel like I have my own little zone now.

One solution I could see to that is to have them collect in drifts along the stone walls, tree trunks and other artefacts and displace the grass.

Also, these remind me of the peach tree in my courtyard, and I have the impression that it often drops whole blossoms, which would displace more grass and be more visible.
This could have just been after a hailstorm though, I would have checked a month ago but all our flowers have faded.

… I like orange.

You are right! I have tried a few times to add petals to the ground, but it has been difficult, since the entire area is full of thick, tall yellow grasses. When the petals are on the ground, they are not seen at all, and if they are floating on top of the grasses, they look very wrong. It’s something I just haven’t been able to work out yet.

They are all somewhere between 1-6k tris, but some of them still need to be optimized. They add up to a lot because we place them everywhere, but hopefully we’ll be able to keep all of them around if they get optimized a little.

My favourite are the eucalyptus trees, they’re absolutely stunning.

Seeing them recreated with so much attention and care is really great. You really captured the essence of each.

I actually *really* like the olive trees; everything else is so pretty, but those look like they’ve been through the shit.

Best comment ever.

True that! :)

I look forward to wandering around these forests!

Excellent work regardless.

And as for the maze puzzles you designed yourself, I can’t wait to try them. Seeing how the last tree update was more about two years ago it’s a nice surprise, the trees have evolved a lot.

Hope you keep posting your ideas and good luck to you Orsoyla and the rest of Thekla!

I was […] hired to develop some interesting, hidden things around the island.

And this, my friends, is one of the awesome things only an indie studio can afford to do.