French artist Turboscalpeur talked about his work with virtual grass assets and shared some details of the production process. These assets could be actually used anywhere: Unity, 3ds Max, Blender and so on.

French artist Turboscalpeur talked about his work with virtual grass assets and shared some details of the production process. These assets could be actually used anywhere: Unity, 3ds Max, Blender and so on.  

Introduction

Hi, my nickname is turboscalpeur, I’m from France and I am working on creating Natural Environments for the game industry. I grew up in Paris where I studied human sciences first, then moved to Montpellier on the South of France to study landscape design & botanic; I worked several years in different kinds of gardens, mostly Mediterranean.

At the beginning, it has been only a hobby to me to modify or enhance Vanilla’s Data from Games; one thing led to another, I first heard about Unity in 2012 and started to produce more and more textures from 2014 until today. I was lucky to meet some decisive people as Marcurios, Eric Chahi during these years recommending me to produce assets for games industry.

Building Textures

At the moment I have a good old Nikon D90 (currently looking for a new camera though!); but without going into explaining every step of my production of grass textures, I can say that you can have the best Camera in the world and not get the best results. Indeed, the “Eye” of the photographer and some important techniques/rules are the basics of all realistic texturing work.

What are the biggest difficulties of using these materials in games?

I have already made some different investigations in the Unity 5 to settle grass with a high-quality level and keep great performances at the same time.

I found a very interesting way to use very small terrains tiled and optimized each time using some complementary assets. I’m also looking at creating compiled textures files, directly attached to Meshes as in some of Bethesda’s games. This way you can manage to get a full field and/or a forested area, for example, for an entire game without losing your FPS.

How can we work with your assets? Are they flexible enough?

My Assets are currently working with Unity. But as they are  .psd files, so they can being used in any engine or software (3ds Max, Maya, Blender). I’m planning to expand a good part of my production to others engines.

Unity is it’s pretty easy to use. If you want simple paint details, just drag & drop every grass you want to use in each terrain inspector, then stay on the scattering part, using brushes or terrain editors or something else. My assets are fully compatible.

You also can customize them with meshes or shaders in order to get even better results!

Turboscalpeur, 3d artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev. 

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