As another big milestone in my career as a game developer, I have released my first free game asset pack on Itch.
After spending literally hours over several days looking for leaf textures that I could put on the branches of low-poly trees for mid-90s Raw 3D graphics, I eventually reached the point of “Fine, I’ll do it myself”.
I used the Modular Tree extension for Blender to create a branch structure, and then took used the textures from the four Branches Texture Packs by Yughues from OpenGameArt.org as leaves. The Modular Tree documentation for the current version is not very good, but all it really takes is a Tree Masher node, a Trunk node, and a Branch node. The Leaves node is only for generating 3D models of individual leaves, which is completely unnecessary when all that’s needed is some green blotches that will disappear in the low resolution. Somewhat unintuitively, the settings for configuring the leaf of branch textures that go on the tree are not found in a node, but rather in a modifier that is automatically added to the generated tree object. Once I found that, the rest turned out to be easy.
I put a small spherical light between the branch and the camera and increased the default ambient light to get good colors, and rendered the scene with a transparent background. I then used the Batcher plugin for Gimp to resize the original renders to 128×128 and 256×256 resolutions with no interpolation to get the nice grainy pixel look, and to convert the images to 16 indexed colors to get crisp edges, with just a few clicks. Batcher makes its so much easier than trying to learn writing Gimp scrips yourself, which probably might take days or even weeks.
The Batcher plugin window with my settings.
It’s really a super easy process once you have all the tools and the whole procedure is worked out.
This isn’t much, but I would have loved to have found something like this a week ago and so probably there are some people out there who have a use for these textures, or at the very least the process to create similar ones. And how many people have said they are going to make their own videogame from scratch and have never reached the point where they have asset packs to give away?