Petrograd, a project being developed by Space Cowboys Studio. blog - UltimaRage

Since joining the Petrograd team, I have been very busy learning new things. However, before joining this team, I started out with just level design with the Sandbox 2 program using Cryengine 2. In Crysis, the thing that really astounded me was the vegetation and how it was rendered. One day, around a year after I had been working with Sandbox 2, I saw a modification being created by a member in Crymod who had created some very realistic forest scenes with custom-modeled vegetation, but he disappeared. Then, another member made an equally impressive forest and he stuck around.

I started looking into how low poly vegetation is created, and then when I found out how simple the basic concept was, I realized that the rest was just going to be up to me and experimentation. Since then I have been able to create lush forest environments with detailed ground-level plants and I have finally gotten a bit of a knack for making trees, although they are much, much harder than ground-level vegetation. The diffuse textures and geometry really have to have a good balance to come together and create realistic vegetation.

My work so far can be seen in Petrograd's August update.

Moddb.com