This is an attempt at realistic foliage placement. The FPS is ridiculously low (<30 FPS) but it is a basis to work with. The secret appears to be combining the landscape material with root meshes, and a limited number of rocks and grass meshes. It is also wise to add a little noise to the landscape terrain and smooth it afterwards, but not too much or the player will constantly move up, down, up down, up down and motion sickness will take its toll.
During the last month a lot of stuff has happened. I moved my equipment to a different floor, renovated another room in my house and bought an amazing piano for a ridiculously low amount. All the while I did my best to move the project forward. In the beginning I planned to use the trailer as a means to look for crew members. I made a profile on:
https://www.teamups.net/
and included a ton of info on each position, but to this day they haven't approved the team request, despite several emails to support. I didn't want to ask for crew members on facebook again, because I made some bad experiences in the past with crew members that are not close or at least somewhat close to my place of living. I want to meet my team face to face and not talk to them solely via Skype, hiding behind a screen. And I want to negotiate with them in person.
Unfortunately I hadn't heard from any developers at TUM either .... but in all fairness: I f*** up half of the presentation. I should have gone there earlier and check out all their equipment. When I was there, they couldn't even see half the stuff I showed them. The first group of students came late because of the weather and the traffic and therefore AFTER I showed the trailer, and the others couldn't see the presentation well because the room was too bright for the beamer to create a clear picture. All of these things could have been avoided, if I just had gotten there earlier. This is particular annoying because I had spent almost a month preparing for that presentation.
..... but so it goes ....
So after a lot of digging I came across this list:
http://www.games-bavaria.com/company/
This is an index of Bavarian developer companies. I need help. And I'm certain that the name of the crew that I'm going to work with is somewhere on this list. Some of these developers are amazing and have very high standards. So I was about ready to send them the trailer and then .... one day in a facebook post from one of the Unreal Engine developers he asked a question about foliage meshes in an infamous Unity demo. I didn't know it before, but it destroyed me...
It's even called f**** "Book of the Dead" .... a little bit on the nose, don't you think?!!
When you compare it to my trailer, you will know what I mean. To say it in the words of an editor who gave me devastating feedback years ago: "There is a delta".
All this work and I can't compete with this kind of quality. But I know that it's not impossible either. I know that there are certain limitations when it comes to VR, because you need to be certain that the FPS is stable and constantly at a very high level (90 FPS). Because of this, my game can't contain shadows .... and yes, things like that make it a lot harder to get a realistic look .... but I can't stop watching this demo.
Years back when I got the feedback from the editor, I teamed up with Tom Salta, one of the very best producers and composers I ever met. I learned a lot from him, but in order to beef up my skills, I had to work my ass off. He gave me percussion cues from Howard Shore and Hans Zimmer to translate into Midi. I had to listen to each cue and recreate every single instrument in MIDI, make a mockup and ensure that it sounds realistic. It was the toughest task I ever had, partly because I was given a maximum timeframe of 5-8 hours for each cue, but also because it forced me to buckle up and do the hard work.
So I figured, that's what I'm going to do here now too. I need to sit down and work my ass off on realistic foliage and study how these things come together. I can't sit on my ass and wait for an environment artist all my life and complain that I can't find one. I need to learn how to do that myself.
