Creating a Forest Background for LLRR

I generally avoid creating backgrounds in LLRR. I don't like setting a precedent that makes me feel obligated to model every last little location that occurs to my imagination.

However.

As I move forward with the remainder of LLRR, I'm looking to the future and starting to put some thought into my revamped, new-and-super-improved workflow. And I felt like coming up with a process for creating something like a forest would have a lot of future usability. So I decided I would make a simple forest for the camping update.

I've mentioned recently that I've been studying geometry nodes in Blender. And as I've mentioned recently, they are an absolute gamechanger. I decided to "invent" my own toon-shaded forest with dynamic forest terrain that I can mold and sculpt to my needs. The ground this forest is built on can be expanded easily, and it'll randomly fill with new trees and bushes.

The Process

I wanted a forest that would not be too resource-intensive to render or work with. But I also wanted it to be a literal, 3D-modeled forest I could place my characters within, instead of just a backdrop. I also wanted it to look reasonably decent for my art style.

First, I made this image plane that's basically a solid color of a bunch of leaves:

I gave it a material that performs a faint gradient to make it darker near the bottom.

Then I took a very simple tree trunk with branches, like so:

And gave that a similar gradient-type texture:

And with these two pieces set, I could use geometry nodes to "automatically" create this:

Which I rather liked. I intentionally set up the material so it could blend multiple bunches of leaves together into one solid color like that. It looks a lot worse when it performs the gradient on each individual bunch of leaves instead.

Now, here's what it's actually doing:

It's a mess, but each plane is only 4 vertices. Really, it's pretty efficient. Everything you see before you is 412 vertices total, which is really not too shabby.

Here's the geometry node setup:

It may be impossible to really read anything, but the gist of it is this: "Take the tree trunk, and start sticking leaf image planes onto it. Don't do any on the bottom. Randomly rotate and scale them around."

It was a mixture of following multiple tutorials and working shit out on my own, but it was really satisfying once I got it behaving the way I wanted.

Next, I decided to make two more trees, as well as a bush.

I shoulda made more bushes, and of at least one additional color, but I was getting impatient. Next was the geometry node setup for the entire forest:

This is sweet, because it's an actual 3D model I can zoom around in:

The material I used on the ground will naturally change color based on elevation, which turned out to be a double-edged sword later, but for now I'm pretty happy.

Anyway, I can change the shape of this model to be whatever, and forest will simply appear randomly across it. I can also exclude areas if I want. The geo node setup for it is similar to that of the tree, in that I'm spawning instances across the surface of a mesh.

But here's the thing:

You can't really render outlines with this. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say, I had to split this to its own view layer where outlines aren't calculated, and then Blender composites the result on top of my outline-rendered images.
This means the trees and leaves will never have outlines, which is a little bit of a shame, but I think it's fine.

And I was tempted to call it good there, but I was just too bothered by how it looked with a pitch-black sky. It wasn't an issue if the camera was pointed at the ground, but I know I'm going to have some shots where the fucking sky is visible.

So I followed some tutorials on setting up a procedurally generated sky texture, complete with clouds. I did one for day, and one for night, because my typical gimp technique of "darken everything and tint it blue" doesn't work on a bright blue sky very well. This will be impossible to read, but is the shader node setup:

The top 6 nodes are for the daytime sky. The nighttime sky includes stars 'n shit, so it was trickier. The second-to-last node on the right lets me blend between day/night.

And thus, you have the result I posted up top. A daytime camping shot, and a nighttime one with a different sky material.

Obviously, there's more that could be done to improve ALL of this, but for the time being, I like how it looks enough to proceed. And the camping update's taking forever, so I gotta move forward.
But all this to say, I'll be able to tinker with these node setups when the time comes to start my next game. Forests, check.

Geo nodes are pretty fucking cool. Really, the stuff I'm doing is so basic and simple compared to what I've seen other people do with them. But hey! All part of the process.