After many pains and troubles, I have now managed to work out all the technical aspects for how to create the kind of low-fidelity trees that I want to populate my game with. While it goes for a Quake engine or PS1 look with the textures, this is an approach to trees that nobody actually seems to have used back in the days. Though in my memory, this is what trees typically used to look like in games from the 90s.
I am pretty happy with the results, but the last remaining obstacle is that I really don’t know how to model the very top of a tree.
Since the trees will mostly be seen from below, having a bit of weirdness going on at the top won’t be a huge problem. But the approaches I tried so far are looking very wrong. Any suggestions how to shape the uppermost branches and how to attach the leaves to them?
I checked how Morrowind did it, which is where I got the idea for the style for. And they seem to have done just that on many of the trees.
Looks a bit weird, but given the hundreds of hours I’ve spend with that game and never noticed it, it’s probably something that doesn’t actually stand out unless you deliberately look for it.
Probably the best way to do it, even if it doesn’t look great. But I noticed that this style of trees really does have very little in common with the anatomy of actual trees. There is just enough visual cues there to make the brain think of trees, even when its a very poor match.
