Sara Drake ✿

(ㄒoㄒ)  Took a wrong turn that ate up too much time!

I wanted a California breeze rippling through my plant meshes at the request of the foley artist I’m working with. I thought the best option was to (painstakingly) animate the meshes in Maya and export them as individual animation files. I tried to use the lattice mesh deformer with a particle effect and a turbulence field in Maya, which was a terrible idea. This yielded quirky results : 

The better solution was to use a shader : 

@minionsart’s shader tutorials and scripts are easy to understand and are beginner friendly. I used their moving grass shader to imitate a California breeze. You can find the code HERE and the details below : 

For my farming simulation, I’ve decided to grow strawberries. The berries grow relatively close to the ground, grow year round in certain climates, produce easy to see fruits (which comes in handy for game design + using a birds-eye view camera position) and are a food crop who’s harvesting is difficult to automate. Strawberry picking robots are currently in development, serving as a barometer for the potential of autonomous farming technology due to the careful and delicate nature of berry harvesting. Since I’m curious about autonomous farming, the connection is a generative starting place. Strawberries also allow me to research the agriculture industry in California, ranking as the 6th largest produced food commodity in the state.  A few words on software before I begin : 

I’m a big advocate for Blender as my main 3D graphics program. I taught myself Blender during a period of unemployment and would not have been able to do so without the support of a robust online community interested in educating others. While there are more powerful 3D graphics programs on offer, Blender is an open source tool. As an artist, I prioritize using free and open source tools for my work, both as a practice of freedom and to further support for FOSS tools. (Read more about the use/implications of FOSS tools HERE).  At the moment I am a graduate student, teaching in a digital design program that introduces Maya to undergraduates. In an effort to make this project legible to students, I’ll be using Maya. This is in no way an endorsement for either graphics program. I encourage anyone curious about 3D graphics to try out a variety of tools before deciding on what will work best for you. 

✿✿✿✿✿ Back to strawberries. 

Most farming games use a single asset to represent a food crop that gets repeated multiple times to create a field :

I wanted the plant life in my simulation to have more individuation than is typical, so I designed a workflow to procedurally generate and animate parts of the plant depending on what is happening in the world around them. 

I made a quick storyboard to get a sense of timing. For personal projects, I like boarding in flash/animateCC or on paper. : 

I created a base sequence of meshes in various states of growth that I could manipulate into unique leaf stalks. I then duplicated the original base meshes and remodeled them to create a variety of different stalk shapes. I easily doubled the amount of variety by duplicating and mirroring sequences o models and changing their scale. 

Once I had enough to work with I arranged a handful of stalks together until they resembled a strawberry plant. Next, I animated the meshes using Maya’s blend shapes, occasionally swapping out meshes to continue the progression. I decided to keep the leaves tall so that the strawberries will be more visible to the viewer as they grew underneath. 

I created the strawberries, strawberry stalks and base flowers using the same technique. I animated the fruiting stalks on a separate timeline as unique meshes so that they could grow depending on different sets of factors in the game world.