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Diablo Trees

After reading this post on a famous game art tricks blog I decided to have a go at making 2.5d trees.


Here's my test trees so far. I think they look pretty good since they are only about 100 triangles each and a single 512x512 texture. I've also used a simple fake volumetric trick with the leaves, using a spherical normal map for each clump to make them shade as if they were 3d.

I'm sure I can cut down the number of triangles and do some more tricks with the textures to get them to pop a bit more. The real problem is the clip alpha, that's what makes them look more low rez than they are.

EDIT: I added some random noise to the edges of the leaf cluster's alpha and it gives a much more detailed effect:


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