Here’s a look start-to-finish of what it’s currently like to make
a scene in my custom pixel-art rendering engine.
Starting off with an empty scene in Blender,
I first add some stairs by duplicating a stretched cube with the array modifier.
I want to have some stone pillars at the top of a hill,
so I’m just modeling them with some simple extrusions.
Just to fill out the scene, I also modeled a few more stone objects.
Trees are just cylinders with some merged spheres on top
After modeling a single tree, I just duplicate it around the scene,
changing up the rotation and scale
Next I add some rocks of varying sizes, made up of subsurfed cubes
I decided I wanted some big stone tiles at the top
Here I add a bit of damage using a Boolean cut
I extrude some cylinders to form the shape of a larger tree at the top of the hill
The leaves are just made up of spheres again
A few bushes are made using the same technique as well
I added another pillar at the bottom with its top chopped off
Now I’m blocking in a pond under the big tree with some rocks around it
At this point my project is a mess of unorganized objects so I take some
time to organize it into collections To make the rocks look more rock-like,
I apply a procedural displacement and remesh to reduce the poly-count
The stone blocks also get some procedural detailing, adding some brick-like details
All the leaves get some random displacement, and the normals are edited to improve lighting
Next the tree trunks get a procedural woody displacement,
which looks pretty good after decimation
At this point the scene is ready to be imported to the game engine,
which automatically bakes all of the procedural displacements into static geometry
I add a Unity terrain object and start painting in the height map
There’s a few final configurations to set to
tell the engine where to draw the leaf and grass sprites.
Here I’m painting in a dirt path in the terrain, and adding some light hills
I decided the leaves of the big tree look a bit too spherical, so I go back to Blender to fix that
Off camera I made a few more adjustments to the trees
and this scene is more-or-less complete, having taken just under 2 hours start to finish.
Thanks for watching