{"id":7302,"date":"2017-12-09T00:08:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-09T00:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/311367"},"modified":"2017-12-09T00:08:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-09T00:08:00","slug":"environmental-artist-jane-ng-only-made-23-unique-trees-for-firewatch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2017\/12\/09\/environmental-artist-jane-ng-only-made-23-unique-trees-for-firewatch\/","title":{"rendered":"Environmental artist Jane Ng only made 23 unique trees for Firewatch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lead artist at Campo Santo Jane Ng recently presented at the NYU game center about her work as an environmental artist on <em>Firewatch<\/em>, mentioning how\u00a0she only modeled 23 different\u00a0trees featured in\u00a0the game.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Ng emphasized\u00a0that designers don&#8217;t need to create hyper-realistic, detailed assets in order to be memorable, but\u00a0to focus on &#8220;feeling real&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>She\u00a0discussed the importance of atmosphere over realism\u00a0when modeling the environment of <em>Firewatch<\/em>, citing\u00a0a technical limitation for\u00a0the reason she\u00a0manually\u00a0had\u00a0to create the trees.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I had to make it by hand because Speedtree was not integrated in Unity back then.&#8221; She explains. &#8220;It can be done\u00a0but you also realize that very few games have pine trees,\u00a0because\u00a0of all trees in the world\u00a0pine trees are the worst in terms of being made 3D.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The environment of <em>Firewatch<\/em> doesn&#8217;t feel repetitive because, according to Ng,\u00a0objects and places were scaled based on what felt right as opposed to what was accurate.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Definitely check out <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=3yWIoRuwpm0\">the presentation<\/a> to hear more about her creative process during the development of <em>Firewatch.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lead artist at Campo Santo Jane Ng recently presented at the NYU game center about her work as an environmental artist on Firewatch, mentioning how\u00a0she only modeled 23 different\u00a0trees featured in\u00a0the game.\u00a0 Ng emphasized\u00a0that designers don&#8217;t need to create hyper-realistic, detailed assets in order to be memorable, but\u00a0to focus on &#8220;feeling real&#8221;. She\u00a0discussed the importance [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}