Low Poly Trees

I am modeling loads of lowpoly trees in Blender. I find it to be quite relaxing and nearly therapeutic =) So far I've made 12 trees but with 4 variations of each tree bringing the total to 48. Now that I have started to nail down the process of lowpoly tree modeling with some useful keyboard shortcuts and tips/tricks I thought it was time to share it in a devlog post. Then, I thought, I might as well record a tutorial video and release it on YouTube so I spent some more time on it than I had originally intended to but hopefully it'll be useful to some of you!

I have also created a new shader in Unity that I will be using for my trees in That's Racing. I wanted to have slight wind movement in the trees to make them less static and the fastest, most efficient method, and even the easiest to implement most likely, is by animating the trees in the vertex shader. By doing that the GPU takes care of all the computations and it's blazing fast.

I also added some features in the shader so I can adjust a property slider for the lowpoly tree material and transition from green summer colors into autumn colors. Finally, I also added a property slider which adds snow by turning mesh faces facing upwards from their natural color into white. I used "Amplify Shader Editor" which is an awesome asset for Unity to visually create the shader so for once I didn't end up having to code the shader myself. Awesome.

Here is a video where I do a walk through of the shader:

Thanks for checking out this post and please follow me here on itch.io and YouTube / Twitter to follow the progress of That's Racing and if you want to catch some more tutorials along the way =)