Hello Internet!#
Today, I want to share with you my workflow for creating a 3D forest scene in Godot engine. This is my first attempt at a breakdown/making-of, so I’ll try to keep it fairly high level. Hopefully this will give you some ideas or inspiration.
I feel it’d be disingenuous to call this a gamedev tutorial as I’ve kept it fairly high level, mostly just talking about my workflow. Hopefully though, this will give others ideas or inspiration.
The idea for this scene sparked from discovering a Breath of the Wild-style grass asset. My curiosity led me to experiment with scaling up the grass generation using Godot’s multi-meshes for performance. Despite initial challenges, I managed to create dense grass tiles around the player.
To fill the scene, I modeled basic terrain in Blender, using a height map to adjust grass height and density, though it’s still a work in progress. Adding trees and rocks helped reduce the barren look of the slopes, creating a more believable area for a short clip.
Lighting#
Lighting and color were the most time-consuming parts. Moving away from Godot’s default skybox, I opted for a stylised HDRI panorama sky adjusting fog colors to match the sunset. Then tinkering with environmental settings like SSAO and depth of field enhanced the scene’s realism and depth.
I also experimented with god rays to bring the scene to life, always tweaking settings to find the right balance. The goal was to avoid repetitive patterns which can break immersion.
Adding ambient movement to the scene’s foliage added a final touch of realism. Though I decided against adding moths this time around.
I should’ve mentioned that this whole process really took a day or two of constant back and forth tweaking settings, but that wouldn’t make a fun video. I guess I’m still toying around with how I want to make videos, so trying new things to see what sticks (hence the jankiness).
In all honesty, I think this video took longer to make than the scene originally. Let me know if you want more as I don’t think I’ll do another for a while otherwise ^^. I’ll keep trying to fix audio oddities in future.
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