Broken Roads - Crafting the Flora

Drop Bear Bytes has posted a dev update about the flora in Broken Roads:

Dev Blog: Crafting the Flora of Broken Roads

With Broken Roads being set in the Australian Outback, we knew it was important to create diverse and vibrant environments to immerse players in a truly Australian-flavored apocalypse. Australia has a huge range of flora and fauna that varies wildly by region, and many of which aren’t found anywhere else in the world. As the technical and VFX artist at Drop Bear Bytes, one of the coolest parts of my job has been helping the art and level design teams fill our apocalyptic world with trees and plants across the whole range of the outback, from forests to barren wastelands.

As a technical artist, I get to work in the wonderful area in between pure art, pure programming, and the mysterious art of level design. One of the immediate challenges we faced was how to fill large areas with dense vegetation (without having to place each bush and twig by hand), and how to vary the vegetation according to the different regions and areas of the game. As a Canadian currently living in Spain, I’ve not yet had a chance to visit Australia, so I started off on a virtual road trip, thanks to Google Maps.

After having visited each of the real-world locations of the scenes in the game, I had a nice overview of what each area’s vegetation looked like. Armed with this, I was able to make some categorizations of the various biomes, and typical plants, trees, and scrub. However, there was still the challenge of filling large environments with regionally correct vegetation, now that I understood what it should look like.

My solution was to create a custom tool, creatively named the Vegetation Tool™ (I’m not the best with creative naming). It allows our level designer, Luke, to paint in the density of vegetation across the scene, and then spawn vegetation according to a pre-defined biome. These biomes are made of a list of regionally correct plants, debris, grass, rocks, etc, and some information describing how they grow and are scattered. This creates a non-destructive workflow; it ensures everything is editable, reversible, and allows the art team to work on or change any individual assets without level design having to redo vegetation every time (just regenerate vegetation with the updated biome). Here’s how that works in practice:

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 Thanks Redglyph!