More Developments. Skydome, plants and new tree.

I've now added the grass throughout the level using the foliage editor in UDK. I was able to paint in the 3 grass clump meshes and played around with the settings. I liked how it looked when the density was set really high, but I knew that this would be a problem with resources and I didn't want to push the level too far, since there's a lot more things to be added yet.
Originally it was too high when I played through the level, so I made changes to it so it was more waist height than head height.

I have now painted a sky dome texture and set it all up in the level. I might edit the position of the colours later, as I haven't decided yet if the orange/yellow colour is too high or too low yet. I really do like the way the suns rays shine through the trees.
I also added all the rocks to the level and spread them out, changing their scale and rotation. I love the way light mass has reflected the colours of the grass onto the rocks, I think it gives a really eerie and alien effect.

This was the set up for the sky dome material. I followed a tutorial for adding the sun. I may move the sun/directional light lower, but the lower the angle the more shadows produced on the surrounding mountains, and some of them look unnatural. So I may have to edit some of the terrain or position the sun at a slight different angle in the sky.

These are some sketches of plant designs that would be within the level. These would be vary between shrub and fern size.

Concepts of the previous plants. I wanted to add some variation of colour in the level rather than have everything a shade of blue. These would create points of interest, and perhaps serve the purpose of leading the player around the area.

This is the progress so far of the large plant, I'll be making the roots next using the branch tool I learned earlier.

These are some tree ideas. I have built the first one sketched and added it to the level. The second one that has glowing blue veins visible that run through its core will be the next one I make. I'll be using an emissive map to get the glowing effects.

 

This tree was made using the same textures as the first one, but with a differently shaped trunk. Changing only the trunk shape meant that I could put in a new species of tree very quickly.