Sparked by a seemingly innocuous forum post, I decided to create a forest scene at night using Godot 3.X. It was an opportunity to revisit past forest scene and see how much I could improve it.
Again, I stick to high-level musings and mostly just talk about my thought process and how I tackled 3D fire in Godot. Hopefully, it is still informative and inspiring. Like before, it is not intended as a tutorial, but rather a general process on how I make my 3D scenes.
Darkness is not your ally#
One hurdle I encountered was the variation in screen brightness and calibration. Initial screenshots I shared got mixed feedback, highlighting the subjective nature of our digital experiences. Namely what can appear perfectly lit on one screen can be shrouded in darkness on another.
I tried to illustrate this in the video, comparing display differences between my monitor and TV, highlighting the inherent difficulty in achieving a one-size-fits-all solution.
Neither are Polygons#
I also spent more time learning about performance optimisation when working with higher detail. I’d sculpted the terrain in Blender, then used stencils for additional fidelity. But to bring this down to a usable model, I baked these details to normal map textures on a lower quality model. This maintains the scene’s detail without compromising performance.
Ultimately, making videos like this is hugely time-consuming for me. I need to find a better way, as this too scrubbing through ~130gb of footage across 100+ files. Not ideal :S
I do at least think I got the mic to behave a bit better, but I basically live in a corridor at the moment. Getting this consistent may be an impossible battle for now!
Thanks for reading/watching, and please let me know what you’d like to see next in the comments!
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Beau Seymour
