Hello everyone!
Here's the second part of my Thoughts About Sea Of Thieves! In case you missed it, here's a great first post where I just talk about rocks and sand for a while. Reviews are in, people love the rocks! Consider checking it out.
Without further ado, let's jump into the greenery in this game!
I've been sailing around for a bit for the past two days, trying to get as much variety as possible. I gotta be completely honest and say that 1. I'm terrible with maps 2. This game still scares the shit outta me. So with those two big things working against me, I'm afraid I don't have a lot of varied screenshots, but I hope that's enough. Sorry, I'm actually a really fake gamer y'all.
Let's start from the ground up.
Before getting into the meaty stuff, I would love to talk about the tinier plants-- mostly the grass and wild plants! Even if they're small and inconsequential, the way they've built it is very interesting and inspiring!
I will try to condense screenshots in grids, so the post isn't as long-- if you click on the images you'll see them in full!
Grass is both a headache and a blessing for environments--if you do it right (nice texture, normals that allow them to blend into the ground seamlessly with no weird shadows, shader that lets them gently ondulate in the wind), you can dress up a scene in no time and make it look nice with just some grass assets. In my experience, they're very cheap to produce and you can come up with a lot of variations for your environments.
But if you don't think about the way they're constructed, you might also get a bunch of issues. It's never simple! If you draw them in a 2D plane, you might get some funky overdraw issues (that is, when you have objects with a lot of transparency, that means extra work for the rendering engine). If you're doing them in 3D you might avoid overdraw, but you gotta think about how to make them polygon-efficient but still looking good enough at all viewing distances--and doing that also takes extra time!
There's also another problem--however you do it, you have to place a shitton of grass in order to avoid awkward patches of empty ground floor. It's usually not very noticeable unless you're constantly looking at the ground, but if you notice it, it looks kinda weird! The grass is just cut off straight at some point at the bottom. You can make that up with MORE grass and hope for the best....or do something like the patch of clovers in the first screenshot!
Aside from crisscrossing planes of grass to maximize viewing angles (so you always have some grass to look at, rather than just the side of a plane), they've added a bottom layer of clovers! It's just an extra plane with lots of pretty texture information that adds so much-- it covers the awkward bald spots, and hides the cut-off grass at the bottom. It's really nice! I gotta use that for my own projects!
But even then, you cannot overuse this technique. Even if it's just an extra plane, if you multiply that by thousands, it still adds up-- That's why I really liked their second solution to grass variety. They added simple yellow flowers on top of the grass texture! You get easy variety with none of the extra polygon headaches, and it looks super cute, too!
If you combine all of that, plus subtle hue shifts for your grass, you suddenly get a lot of rich, and relatively cheap variety! It's great! It's efficient! It's Good Grass! Add that with a couple random knee-high plants, like the one in screenshot three, and you've got a lush lush ground.
As a little bonus, I also wanted to highlight their tiny seagrass and algae. You can take a look yourself if you jump in the water near the shore. It's cute! It's not just basic seagrass, they've bothered to make a couple different variations, and they've even included phaeophytas! That's the reddish brown algae! Bonus point for algae accuracy. Good shit, man. I love it when devs remember algae exist.
If you were wondering if those yellow flat flowers were the only ones in the game, don't you worry! They've also made a lovely series of plumeria-like flowers that you can find in the friendlier islands. My lack of seafaring experience might be speaking here, but they feel quite rare--it's mostly palm trees and fronds from what I've seen, so it was a treat to find these. They aren't just flat planes: the petals are all polygonal, and they added stems and stamens! It's decadent honestly. I'm still thinking about the blue-tipped flower. Definitely try to find these next time you set sail.
Enough about tiny plants! We want to see the big boy plants!
There's a LOT to talk about the bigger foliage here. SO much that I might have to do a final post with all the little details on non-foliage wood textures and some prop highlights. But I digress.
One of the things I like to be insufferable about games is their choice of foliage. I don't mind if they do generic trees and bushes if the setting is nondescript. But if you're doing something with a stronger setting, such as a big world of tropical islands, you bet I will be grouchy if you suddenly include birch trees, pine trees, and sakura flowers. They might look good but they also look really really odd next to palm trees. This might be because I grew up in a tropical island; birch trees still look super exotic to me. I won't go on twitter and complain about realism, but I WILL be a little sad that devs didn't seem to have fun researching the wonderful wonderful world of tropical plants. There are so many! You can go nuts! Let's escape eurocentrism in foliage please!
At the same time, I have to confess that I'm not an expert in plants-- I'm still learning and buying books. But in any case, I was very happy to find that Sea of Thieves does a really good job with it's plant choice. There aren't any weird non-tropical plants that stand out, and they have a lot of fun stylizing them while still keeping them recognizable. So that's another bonus point!
What I also like is that despite their very cartoony aesthetic, they still use roughness maps (that is, how reflective or not a model is) to pull out nice lighting angles and bring them closer to the real thing. As a result they have strong highlights that further compliment the stylized look, and if you look closely you can see that they've played with the roughness map to have less glossy spots here and there, to mimic little tears and damages in the plant. It's really nice!
I know a lot of cartoony/stylized games usually forego using normals and roughness because they do add up into the game filesize, but this often means that most of the game looks a bit flat and made of the same material, unless they spend extra time hand-painting highlights and other texture information.
That's why it's extra nice in Sea of Thieves' case. They've had the budget and time to sculpt most big boy plants, so you have that extra layer of texture playing with the light, and then they mix that with painterly colors and brushstrokes, and the result is an explosion of lovely micro detail.
I also have to call out how bananas they went on foliage variation-- you can see that in the third screenshot. You have a bunch of palm trees, but it's not just the same asset rotated (which is already good in most games!! please rotate your trees!), they've made alternate leaf textures! This is true of the big bushes as well, you've got all these different plants with different leaflet width, different shapes, and tiny coloration details. I find their choice of palm trees particularly smart--there are a shitton of variations, many of them comprised of thin leaflets that look very nice and elegant, but:
- they're kinda noisy.
- since they're using flat planes for the leaf texture, the animation would look wonky; palm leaflets often flutter individually and that's EXPENSIVE to do in a game, not worth it for trees!
- stylization favors chonkyness and bolder silhouettes, especially for bigger assets.
- for me, the best looking game trees are the ones that have little to none small air pockets/negative space in their leaves. i guess this is kinda related to chonkier silhouettes. trees that are mostly big fluffy shapes just looks better!
So it makes sense that the thinner, leafletty palm trees were turned into bushes. I bet there are actual tropical bush species like this, but if you're running out of bush ideas for your game and you want something more tropical looking, just steal ideas from palm trees. They're wild!
I wanted to make some comments about the use of color in the bigger plants as well! I've seen a lot of PBR guys saying that it's best if you don't pain any light information in the color texture of assets, and for realistic games I can totally see that. But if you're doing a very stylized game, even one with mostly realistic lights and shadows, I think you're allowed to have a little fun!
It's mostly very subtle here, or painted in normals, but the first image shows some painted shadows and i think they're lovely. They add extra depth at a very subtle level--one that is hard to achieve in sculpted detail/normals; such soft details can disappear when you're baking your details into a flat texture-- that just makes them a little more grounded. It's also essentially a variety in color as well, so, it's all win/win in my book!
I also appreciate that they added three or four plants that aren't primarily green. Homogeneity in color helps you have a harmonious scene (stylization doesn't like too much noise after all!), but it can also bleed over and become monotonous after a while. That's why it's cool that they have striking red fronds, or yellower plants even. A little pop of color can be a waypoint for players, or just a little treat for them to find and go, ah! A new stimuli!
Lastly, it's nice that they went a little looser with the brushstrokes for the biggest fronds. It's hard to spot unless you're actively standing still for a while (and the game often makes you run away or fight critters...), which makes it an extra nice detail from the devs part. It's not random splotches; the strokes still follow the natural pattern of the plant, and they're very economical about where they place them and how long they run for.
This, combined with the little edge wears is a lovely contrast. Mixing broad strokes and tiny details is a difficult art! I appreciate how they've balanced these little realistic details of damaged and dry edges with bigger, simpler strokes. Just a little yellow edge can add a lot to your plants!
Last bit: miscellaneous plant details
Almost there, folks! Thanks for sticking all the way to the end.
I wanted to add this little section because I found it important to highlight. Palm trees are fucking weird! It's hard to get the gashes in the leaves right, their big fronds are a great canvas where you can get lost in minute detail, and their trunks are a whole issue.
Tree trunks in general are probably the hardest bit, for me at least, because it's most of the tree, it's not really interesting to look at, and yet if you don't do it right it stands out immediately.
I really like how they solved the issue of the trunk texture in sea of thieves! Rather than spending precious polygons in modeling each band with its particular widths and crevasses, and ending up with a jagged silhouette, they took a risk! They bet for flat color bands to add that effect, and instead go nuts with its general width. Even if this isn't entirely realistic, it makes for a clean AND more importantly fun silhouette. It feels like a perfectly normal palm tree. So what if the middle is thinner than spaghetti-- it works! I wish i did it for the palm trees in my game, actually!
Lastly: vines and creeping plants! It's unsurprising at this point, and yet it's nuts that they made completely different models and textures for their creeping plants. I appreciate how they aren't just climbing from one edge to the island to another, like cables, but rather firmly rooted in rock walls. In higher density areas they would've added too much noise, and there are more effective ways of framing scenes and making arcs.
It's cool that they added their own stem texture, with a little bit of geometry so it isn't a literal tube. Again, little details like this are worth it to make sure plants are grounded and believable, while still keeping the stylized look. They're great and I love them!
That's it for this post!
Thank you so much for reading! Unsurprisingly I went a little nuts there with all the little foliage details this time, so I'll leave the wood and props portion for its own post. That one might take a while longer to post because I need to go back to my other responsibilities--such as learning how to ride a bike.Here's a little bonus rock, for making it to the end:
