I spent this week populating the environment with miscellaneous assets both new and old to help polish the environment. Some of the new assets I created included crates, pots rolls of paper and books. The books themselves have a unique material that uses a mosaic texture to vary the colour between each static mesh based on their position in world space. This helps break up repetition and removes the need for multiple material instances and textures for each variant. The colours used in the mosaic are based on photos of various book, I focused on older leather-bound books such as religious texts and encyclopedias as that was more appropriate for the setting.
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| Material graph for the book shader. |
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| The books in the scene showing the variance from the shader. |
To fill out the background of the environment I am using SpeedTree to quickly build foliage such as trees and variants of them. Because I want a fairly dense result I aim to keep the poly count as low as possible. I plan to use these tree predominantly in the background so I want to use as much topology for the silhouette and not minor details where possible. While Monster Hunter's flora is fictitious I still researched into the species native to swamps and wetlands such as the bald cypress and used them as reference. when building these.
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| A tree variant inside of SpeedTree. |
