Building stuff in Neos: Flax Bed Minigame from ATITD, part 1

hi i'm zachary and this is neos i'm going to show you how i built a sort of a mini game that was taken from a tale in the desert link down below for that and how i built it completely in neos so let's take a look at the game first okay so let me spawn out uh the minigame for my inventory okay so we can see that it's this uh planter sort of thing and then a plant sort of appeared now this is flax and the idea is that you want to grab some flax or make some flax now a weed just appeared and i'm just going to leave it there and then something else appeared um this seed and if i grab the seed it goes one flax seed clearly i'm on the wrong side to view that message and then another seed appears and i can grab it and it says plus one flax seed so the idea um behind this is you would plant one of these seeds and you would get one of these planters the plant would appear the weeds would appear and then you could get some seeds from the plant and that way you could actually create more planters to get more flax seeds and what's left at the end is just a flax seed and then you can pick it up and you get plus one flaxseed now let me also show you uh what happens when i when i do pick the weed okay so here again let me see if i can get to the correct side okay so here is the flax plant and then the weed is going to appear like here so i can grab the weed and pull it and it disappears now you would wait some amount of time and the weed appears again so i'm going to pull it again and then okay so what this actually is ignore that tool in the background here um what this is what this represents is sort of a bundle of harvested flax and if we look at an image from the actual uh tail in the desert game this is not exactly flax this is what a bundle of stuff looks like i think this is straw and i think the flax has a sort of a bluish color so that's uh that's pretty much that so that's the game um i thought it was interesting because it was pretty self-contained uh aside from an inventory system which i didn't bother to implement uh but it was all built in neos so let's take a look how we can do that okay so i thought that i would start with something relatively simple so let's go into smooth pov so you can see what i'm seeing this is my video capture device and this is the thing that we want to try to reproduce so i said earlier that this was kind of a bundle of stuff this represents straw in the game we can use a different color something something blue okay so um let's reproduce this uh it kind of looks like some cones so if we open up the inventory and we go into essential tools and grab the dev tool tip okay and let us create a new 3d model so these are all basically the the solids that we can create so there's box capsule and so on um so there's cone so let's create a cone all right so it has created just this gray cone uh that's fine to start with um so what we're going to do is let's start with the bottom so i'm going to uh secondary select and then oops and then open the inspector so here's the cone here's the cone mesh so we can specify the height the radius at the base the radius at the top and the number of sides so let's uh let's see so this is going to be fairly small so let's start with a height of 0.1 and let's change the base to like 0.1 okay this is probably too small so let's go ahead and change the radius base to point two and the height to something like point two yeah i i mean i guess that's okay um so the next thing that i want to do is um this is kind of a boring uh thing boring color it's just gray so what i want to do is i want to change the material now right now the material is just this generic pbs metallic so if i look at it there's basically nothing so what i'm going to do is open up the inventory and go to neos essentials and to materials now this material over here it kind of looks like the rind of a watermelon i don't think we have watermelon in here somewhere and i'm not sure that i want to use watermelon i want to use i don't know just something that's reminiscent of straw [Music] so let's try bark is usually my go-to for sort of linear features um let's try oh i don't know let's try this material okay so there's my material so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hold the material in one hand and i'm going to click on the material in the mesh renderer with the other okay and that's what we end up with um for now that's fine it's just something that i want to be able to see better against the background rather than gray eventually i will change this but for now let's just keep it like that okay so next we need uh the other part um the other part of the bottom so it's another cube uh it's another cone so let's create a new actually let's do this so i have this root cone here now what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit the up arrow which will create a parent and i'm going to rename it bundle okay so that way we're a little organized now with the cone um because i wanted to have basically the same material i can just make a copy of this with the square with the green square that creates a copy of the cone now i'm going to click on the copy and i'm just going to rotate it let's see so the red arrow is x so i'm going to rotate it 180 around the x-axis okay and there it is and i can move it up and down by grabbing the green arrow so basically what i want is this to be roughly my roughly half my height because i want the bundle to be approximately my height so that's that the base should be the same as the the bottom so i just need to extend the height so let's call it i don't know is it 0.5 more uh 0.8 more how about just one well it definitely needs to be more than that um actually oh yeah right so it extends the height both top and bottom so i can bring this down maybe like this okay so that's wrong so the bottom needs to be fatter so in order to do that first of all i can change the top radius to something like .2 well that's no good how about 0.05 okay that's certainly getting closer 0.07 yeah that looks pretty good okay so um one of the one of the issues though is that it's if you look it's extending down below the base which i don't really want so i'm going to change the height again to say 0.8 now let me um so okay so here is okay i still see it below so let's change it to maybe 0.7 and then raise it up a bit okay uh let me change the top radius again to something like 0.1 okay yeah this is this is looking a little closer to the proportions that i want although the bottom now looks a little uh it doesn't look so great so let me go to the bottom so and this is you know this is a lot of uh working in neos is just you know trying different things seeing what looks nice so let's see um the top radius let's change the top radius to 0.1 oh that's looking pretty good okay it yeah i think this is pretty good um let's just leave it like that okay let's check the bottom side doesn't look like anything's going through so i think that's pretty good now the other problem is that the other problem that i want to solve let me deselect all is i want to grab this as a unit right so if i currently grab one of the items well that's no good so let me undo the grab so what i'm going to do is on the cones themselves there is a grabable and i'm just going to delete the grabbable and also on the other one okay so now the problem is that i can't grab it at all so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go up to the bundle i'm going to attach a component this is transform interaction grabbable okay and now um i should be able to grab the entire thing but i'm not why is that um why am i not able to grab any of this is it because of the collider is it because i have no collider oh wait there we go okay uh maybe it's because i have the selected yeah okay that's right it was trying to grab the the arrows because i have the the dev tool tip right right here so there we go i can place it on the ground just like that great okay so the next thing is we need to flip the shape basically so what i'm going to do is i'm going to rename this should i rename this okay so here's what i'm going to do i'm going to click the yellow star this will create a new child and i'm just going to call this half and then i'm going to take the cone grab it into the half and take this cone grab it into the half and now i can duplicate the half duplicate and then go to the duplicate and rotate it around the x-axis 180 degrees and move it up something like that i think that's pretty close i can probably fine tune it by typing in the numbers themselves okay so there we go it is about my height the bark doesn't look so great and i'm not entirely certain that uh the the short cones look okay um i think i'll just leave it it doesn't have to be exact to this picture um i feel that this is just fine so let me see if i can find a better material so let me deselect and let's go to materials again let's try say this one okay so we'll go into cone and then we will okay so that altered the top one it still doesn't look so great so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go into the other cone and do this as well okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to mess with the material so i'm going to open it up and we're going to change the texture scale so right now you can see the texture is sort of i don't know knobbly or something so let's change the texture scale to 0.5 and see what effect that has okay so that sort of expanded it let's change it to two okay this is looking a little more linear so let's change it to five this is looking very linear seven eight okay so let's go with eight um let's change the y to let's go down first okay that just makes it a little blurry uh let's change it to two no okay so i'll stick with one good enough the next thing that i want to do is i want to change the color so let's see what happens when i change the color all right so i'm just changing the color we want it to be somewhat i don't know blue blue-ish sure that looks okay okay so that's kind of the effect that i'm going for um i i really don't like these um these uh blotches let me just see if i can get rid of them by changing the texture scale again to maybe 10 15 no i mean it it's basically just expanding and contracting this way so obviously what i need to do is change the y let's try 2 no go down 0.5 um yeah that's just not looking very great i can change the texture offset because i think what's happening is the the blotches are on one side so if i change this to like point font and you know that yeah that just doesn't work okay so i can maybe find something else so let's try uh instead of bark let's go with um what would okay um [Music] shall we try this material let's see how this works okay let's go ahead and open that up texture scale 10 yeah this this looks even worse let's not do that let's try what wood siding okay this has linear features let's try um this one and see what it looks like okay that's actually uh the wrong orientation but let's see if we can fix that um can we fix that can we fix the orientation of the material um it's not obvious to me how to do that unfortunately so now obviously if if i if i knew anything about blender i could probably figure this out but i know nothing about blender so that is a non-starter let's see shingles now you do foreign do so okay um let's try this kind of um not exactly rough bark so what's this bark number one and bark number four so i think i tried like bark number i don't know what did i try bark number four let's try bark number one or even bart no now let's try bark number one and see what happens so we'll go to this cone and we'll go to the material okay this does look nice and linear okay i think there's some hope here so let's change the texture scale here to something like 10. this is looking good let's change the y to something like i don't know 0.5 yeah that's that's looking nice and linear and straight let's also change the metallic i don't know what that does smoothness again i don't really know what that does there's the height map if we change this to 0.1 that kind of makes it i don't know heightier so you see how it sort of has this kind of well maybe you can't see it but um in 3d it does sort of have this um effect that um uh these are actual like stalks of something so let's keep it like that okay i think that's pretty good so now we have this orb which is the material so let me get rid of this so now what i can do is i can go to the neos tools and i can go to the material gun that's the mesh tip material tip okay so let me clip this tool and grab the material orb and stick it in the tool and now i can just point it at these four items and it applies the materials so now i can equip and get rid of that okay so there's that oh and unfortunately i didn't color it properly so let's go ahead and pull this out again um let's see if we can [Music] do i have a material orb left let me undo grab objects undo grab let me just undo until there we go okay so now i should have the material back what i'm going to do is change the albedo color to something bluish sure that's kind of the color that i'm going for okay that's right i changed it on one material and because the objects share the same material all of them change at one so i didn't actually need this material ball okay and let me go ahead and deselect and take a look at my creation there it is that is my flax bundle but there's still something missing and that is these ropes okay so these are ropes that are sort of tying the bundle together well uh a rope um a circular rope is nothing but a taurus and we know we have that so let's go ahead and create a new 3d model a taurus there is our taurus let me stick it roughly there so um let me double select it and open the inspector grab the taurus and stick it in the bundle and then i can just call it rope rope okay so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to try to size it correctly so first of all i do want it centered along the axis so if we look at the bundle the bundle is wherever it is so you know i can grab it i can move it around the porsche the the pieces of the bundle you can see are basically at zero zero um this one is not at zero zero in fact i can change these numbers to zero so this is the y axis so that's just the offset so that's relative to the parent so the parent can move around but the individual pieces relative to the parent don't move so the the y-axis is this way so the x and the z axis is along this plane right here so i can go to the rope right and i can change the x to zero and the z to zero and now it's perfectly centered um i would just have to eyeball the y-axis so let's go ahead and go to the parameters we have major radius and minor radius so the major radius is the radius of the um of the band itself and the minor radius is basically the thickness of the hose or the rope um so first i'm going to change the minor radius to something that's more rope-like yeah that looks good um and now i'm going to change the major radius to something that is closer to this cone point one does that look good um it yeah it could be a little bit bigger so let me go ahead and make it i don't know 0.11 sure that looks great that looks good okay i can probably stand to move it up in the y-axis just a tad so let's try i don't know 1.35 no that's too much 1.32 that looks perfect to me okay so that's the rope holding the top together uh i think it could stand to be just a little bigger so let me change the major radius to point 12. yeah i think that looks good okay so now we want to paint it with some material because gray is kind of stupid and ugly obviously you want a rope so let us go ahead and open up the neos essentials and go to materials and we have rope here so we've got our choices of a bunch of rope this one rope number two looks a little steel this one is quite bright this one is probably what i should be going for so let's open that up grab it and point at the material okay um i think it's uh i think it's okay um you can see by the striations that maybe we could stand to maybe change the texture scale so let's see what the effect of x two is that's better how about three that's even better what about four that's a little too much maybe i don't know that looks fine okay um do i want to change the coloration well let's take a look um oops can i color it something else i mean it's pretty dark as it is um so adding a color is not really going to do a whole lot which kind of means that you know maybe i should have gone with the the brighter color but uh this is okay that's fine okay so that's the rope now what i want to do is i want to duplicate the rope and put it at the bottom so i don't need this orb i don't need the material so let's duplicate the rope and we're just going to grab the arrow and move it down to something roughly like that and let's see where it ended up so let's put the zeros back in here the reason that that the x and the z and the scale are not exact you can reset the scale to just one one one is because of floating point issues and i understand that maybe we're going to go to doubles instead of single precision floats in practice it doesn't really matter okay that looks pretty good let me now deselect let me dequip this tool and now i'm just going to grab this and take a look at the rope on the bottom it looks pretty good to me so there's our flax bundle now you can see that there's this sort of overlap over here i could probably um you know what i'm going to take this rope which rope is this okay this rope is the rope on the bottom and i'm going to put that let's rename this bottom half so that i know it's the bottom half and this rope is the bottom rope i'm just going to put the bottom rope in the bottom half and the top rope and the top half there we go okay so um the reason that i wanted to do that is that i could take the top half and just move it up slightly so let's try 1.41 there is a tiny little gap so let me make it one 1.405 um i can still sort of see a little bit of overlap 1.406 407. again i'm just eyeballing it this looks good so so again the reason that i put the rope in the half rather than separate is so that it will move along with the top and that is that so let me deselect all move this down here okay now if you look at the xyz coordinates of the bundle as a whole you will see that y is at point 1 and i think that is basically the half over here what you could do is you could add another parent and then um like move the bundle offset it so that the bottom is sitting on the ground um but you know because the ground is just going to be zero i guess it doesn't really matter so that's our flax so i'm going to now call this flax bundle flax bundle oops i put a couple of extra spaces in there okay i think my trigger is kind of trigger happy and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into my inventory um inventory i'm going to make a directory and i'm just going to call it um planter okay now i'm in there now i'm going to take grab the flax bundle with one hand and click the plus with the other and now i have saved my flax material my flax object so i can spawn it out and i can spawn out as many as i want and you will see that it appears sort of right in front of me i don't know what the criteria is for spawning objects if i move this way yeah it kind of spawns in the same place relative to my head where i'm looking at um these kind of look like pillars don't they that's kind of kind of an interesting look but anyway so that is putting together the flax bundle so the next thing that we're going to tackle is the planter itself and actually my recollection was just a little bit different i did actually find a picture of the flask item from the tail in the desert game so let me just show you that so let's see um flax image there it is so that is the actual image of the flax so you can see it's even more watermelon like it's it's very green so i thought that i would try just finding a watermelon texture and sticking it on these things to see what it looked like so i went online and i found a texture image so let's load that up the original texture image was like this and of course we know that we need it vertical so i just went into my image editing program and i rotated it 90 degrees to give us this okay so let's go ahead and so let's go ahead and make a material for this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a new material and instead of pbs i'm going to use um i'm not sure how you pronounce this chassis cxc z tune uh so i'm just going to use this oops did i uh screw that up yeah okay so here is my material and now all i have to do is take the image and with either i can take the other hand and stick it in main texture or i can go through main texture and click and there is my texture right there so you can also apply a normal map a metallic gloss map and a mission map i have no idea what any of this stuff does because again i don't really have any you know 3d art backgrounds so i have no idea what this is um so i'm just going to leave it like this it's going to look a little you know maybe toony instead of 3d ish but so let's see um i'm going to bring up my inspector for one of these flax bundles let's see which one it is it's uh this one right over here so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to let's say the top half and i'm going to recolor this and see what happens okay as predicted it kind of looks like a conical watermelon so now what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go into the material and i'm going to modify the texture scale so let's go to 10 and see what happens wow that actually really looks a lot better i think obviously it doesn't look like it does in the original game the original game probably looks more like this of course you know now you can sort of see the the edge when it wraps around can try fixing that by well i don't know if you can fix that um but in any case i think i think this kind of looks like um a bundle of of things you know even this looks better um it looks like a bundle of of colored straw so let's just go with that um how about the other texture axis the y uh what happens if i go like 0.5 looks interesting i don't know i i guess i kind of like this better one what happens if i go to two um that looks even more interesting how about 1.5 sure let's just let's just keep it like that okay now that i've done that i've got my material orb and i can go onto all the other items and change them as well okay and now that is what it looks like unfortunately the divide between the top and the bottom half you can sort of now see it again i don't there may be a way to fix that okay let's go to the cone so you can see let's uh so you can sort of see that the that really all that needs to be done is we need to rotate the bottom a little bit um so we can go into the bottom half and rotate around the i guess it's the y-axis by a tiny bit that actually looks pretty good so let me deselect so that we can see it again it's uh it's not perfect um we can see a little bit of a seam but um you know if you go a little bit farther away maybe you can't see it so well so so there's our bundle of flax that's actually looking pretty good i wonder what it looks like from the top i can't really see it so i'm going to go into fly mode look at the top sure i mean they didn't do such a fantastic job with the top either this is fine you know nobody's gonna really complain at least i sure won't so that's it that's my material orb what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to save it in my inventory under planter because why not save there we go so now i've got that and i'm going to save the new flax bundle let me delete the old flax bundle and there's my new flax bundle so there we go that is the final version of the flax that i want to end up with all right so now that we've created the flax we're going to move on to making the planter after we do the planter then we will look at some of the plants that appear in the planter and then after we put together the planter we'll look at some of the plants that go into the planter and then finally we'll start working in logics in order to make the actual game work so for now let's take a look at an image of the planter okay so here's my uh my file browser and they called it actually a flax bed so let's go ahead and take a look at this okay so it looks like um kind of this kind of sandstone thing bricks around the outside here um there are these sticks over here so one two three sticks and i assume one two three sticks also there are these sort of like cross twigs and then we have these flax plants growing up the flax plants look kind of like these stems with these violet flowers on top now if i knew anything about blender i would probably just make this as a mesh and then texture it um using you know 3d art magic but i have no power so we are going to build these out of the basic primitives so the bricks are obviously going to be some sort of cube so let's go ahead and take a look at creating a 3d model a box okay so here is my box i'm going to look at it with the inspector and once again we can see that we've got parameters size and there's also uv scale and i believe that has to do with the scale of the um of the texture that you put on the box so i'm first going to size this approximately um so let's see let's just put it on the ground and you can see that um the grid in this sort of grid world um is if this is a one across then the the the major grid is one by one and the minor grid is 0.2 by 0.2 so that's kind of convenient um so let's do that let's change the rotation to zero okay so that it's not actually rotated so that you know it's sort of aligned with these things um and then for the bricks uh let me just take a look at this so we need to decide how big this is and how big this is is going to be based on how big you are um it if i look down at myself um you know i'm thinking that maybe the planter could be three by three that's a little too big how about a two by two planter i think that's fine so uh if this is two units across uh then how big are each of these bricks um so let's say one two that's three that's three and a half full bricks so um three and a half full bricks so that would make each brick about i don't know i don't know math but luckily there is a tool that you can use um [Music] in my public folder under gadgets there's a calculator it's a reverse polish notation calculator which means it's stack based so you can't just do 9 plus 9 you have to do 9 enter that puts 9 on the stack and then 9 plus so basically this is 2. let me get rid of this and equip this okay so it's going to be 2 divided by 3 and a half so 2 enter 3.5 divided by so each of these bricks is 0.57 let's just make it 0.6 to make things easy okay so let's get rid of this okay so each of these bricks is 0.6 across so not going to mess with the scale i'm going to mess with the size of the mesh itself so in the let's see so in the z direction we're going to make this .6 there we go how big are these bricks well they kind of look like they are about one quarter of that so uh 0.3.15 say so that means in the x direction it's going to be 0.15 okay so that's my brick here and how tall are these things um honestly it doesn't matter too much because i can just sink this down into the ground but let's just make it also about 0.15 okay that is my brick now we need to texture the brick okay so this is some sort of a sandstone looking thing so let's see if we can find something in the neos essentials see if we can find a material that is like sandstone is there stone no is there sand stone there's rock okay i mean this could be something uh let's take a look at this rock number nine okay it's kind of darker than than it looks in the materials and i think that may have something to do with the lighting let's take a look at this one this is kind of grayish um this is also kind of grayish um all right so let's try this and then we'll see if we can um just sort of modify the the result so stick that on there okay so let me go ahead and pull this a little closer so that we can see it we can change the uv scale to be the same as the size so that looks i don't know a little better a little smoother maybe let's go into the material and see if we can mess with the color make it i don't think we can actually make it oh we can make it lighter there we go give it a nice sort of sand stoney color sandstone is a little more yellow i guess how about that i guess that's okay i'm not too pleased with it um we can again we can change the um [Music] we can change the texture scale so i think i think the texture scale is different than the uv scale here so scale uv with size sounds like what i want i guess um again i don't really know anything about um about 3d modeling so let's change this to two three four i don't know eight i really don't know what i'm doing 20 okay yeah so that sort of stretches things out so let's make it like uh maybe we don't want scale uv with size um and then in the y what's like this do that's kind of interesting i'm i'm i'm really not happy with this okay so we're not going to do that um maybe we're going to go with this sort of rougher texture this is looking hopeful all right let's open up the texture let's get rid of this ball okay so um it's interesting that it sort of shows up um as this albedo texture here okay here's an idea um let's go with the um let's make a new material and use um zz tune and just take the texture and put it over here take the normal map and put it there um is there like a the equivalent of a height map i guess not okay and let's use this and put it into the brick and see what happens okay see now um the color is not quite the same i don't really understand why blend mode multiply transparent alpha again i i don't know what any of this stuff does i i guess i can change the color to something a little more sandy it's really hard for me to judge color i mean there's the color right there so maybe what i can do is try to match the color like this i'm getting real close i think that's about the best i'm going to do i can also change the brightness on this to something like that how's that i think that's pretty reasonable for a brick okay um so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to take this and i'm going to save it in my inventory oops that's the legacy inventory so planter save that so that's my brick texture okay excellent i have got a brick i don't need that ball anymore okay so now that i have a brick again as before i'm going to create a parent and i'm going to call it um i don't know let's call it the surround okay that way the surround is wherever it is and the box um this is the this is the zero zero point right there that that little yellow dot right there that's the zero zero point of the uh of the planter so let's um create another box and put it next to it so i'm going to duplicate the box and bring it out okay now in order to sort of simulate this seam um i'm probably going to make these blocks a little bit smaller so let me go and delete the box that i just created so instead of uh x uh no the blue axis is z so instead of z being .6 i'm going to make it like .5 what point five six okay now what i can do is i can duplicate the box i didn't mean to do that let me undo that take the box and duplicate not delete and then here what we want to do is move it over by um here's the position here's this box um surround let me reset the rotation on that there now it's perfectly aligned okay here's the original box i can put this at zero and zero and let's take the z being also zero okay that puts it there then i can take this box and put it at zero zero and then the z should be at remember it was point six so if i do that i mean that gap is kind of huge isn't it um so let me maybe change the gap to like let's go to 0.59 and we'll make this 0.59 also okay so i think that's probably more reasonable okay cool so uh we've got a third one so let me duplicate and move over so instead of minus 0.6 it's minus 1.2 there's number three and then we need a sort of half half brick um so i'm going to duplicate the block duplicate the box move it over i guess by minus again minus 0.6 so that brings us to minus 1.8 okay move my video out of the way and now we need to make this a half a brick so instead of point 59 instead of 0.6 it's going to be 0.3 so let me change this to point 3 sure and then 0.3 so i'm changing the uv scale along with the size to ensure that the pattern sort of roughly matches now we can move this over a little bit so it it will end up roughly there with a little gap um so let's make this 1.65 is that reasonable sure and then this would be zero and this would be zero again the reason why they are not exactly zero is due to floating point errors um which is a problem if you actually go out like you know ten thousand units um these errors will actually start adding up um because they will multiply okay um i think that looks pretty good so now let's so instead of calling this a surround let's call this a surround side so i will want actually this gap is not the same i don't like that six uh two six five six six six five five sure okay i think that works works out a little better okay so d deselect uh that gap does kind of look like that gap okay so this is my surround side so again i'm going to make a parent and i'm going to call the parent the surround now i can simply duplicate the surround side and then rotate it and move it let's see root so do this so we're going to rotate around the green axis which is y by 90 degrees 90 degrees okay maybe the other 90 degrees right because i want that half brick to be on that side um so that it's not on this side okay and then i'm just going to move this roughly here roughly here and then i'm going to look at these numbers and i'm going to say okay uh well obviously y should be zero [Music] and let me deselect and take a look at how it looks okay so you may notice this effect here right over here this is called z fighting so it's when two surfaces have exactly the same z uh z height um well in this case y height but it's called z fighting because traditionally z would be the height and they are coincident so neither surface sort of knows which one should be on top so they end up basically kind of alternating almost randomly so that's what you're seeing right over here so the way we can solve that is we can simply take this block and make it smaller so let's go ahead and grab this block i will open an inspector okay so now we need to make this smaller now unfortunately i can't just drag one side um so the size is um in the z axis is probably going to be more like point four maybe it's going to be a little bigger 0.45 a little smaller 0.43 it doesn't have to be mathematically precise is what i'm what i'm trying to trying to get at because you know this is more artistic than anything else okay i think that looks pretty good so let me deselect so that i can take a look at the oops no deselect so that i can look at the effect okay so now we can see that there is no z fighting which is great um we do need to move this over a little bit because you can see that there's a little bit of a little bit of a lip there so let's see close the box look at the surround side so this is going to be um i think it's going to be in the x-axis nope it wasn't in the x-axis maybe it was in the z-axis then okay 1.725 a little more 2-8 and maybe one more two nine two nine five yeah that looks fine okay um great so now i just need to duplicate this side duplicate and rotate it um by close there's the duplicate uh continue rotating it which means that it would be at 180. yep this will go roughly here this will go over there somewhere just probably move over a bit grab my inspector and take a look at where we ended up deselect take a look at it um i can see a little bit of z fighting it may be hard to see which means i do need to move it over a bit let me re-zero the y let's change this this to 1.5 5 no 1.51 1.505 1.5055 1.5058 good enough and the position here 1.94 5 7 8 9. see how that looks i think five okay that looks good good enough now again i could probably you know have calculated the exact sizes and positions of these things but you know why bother um if i can just you know eyeball it once and it's done um okay now we're going to take this side and now okay so i think the problem is if i duplicate this now i wrote that rotate this by 90 okay and i move it over where we can see that we're gonna run into z fighting on the other side so actually it's like this right is that correct i'm not sure that's that's entirely correct um oh yeah right it's supposed to look like this and the problem is that this block was the one that i i made smaller so i'm going to just go ahead and adjust that block so i'm going to open the inspector i'm going to change its z size to point 45 and i'm going to move it over a little bit needs to be smaller 0.42 i think it needs to be a little bigger 0.44 actually how how big was this this other block here point 44 0.44 okay that's good um let us go ahead and [Music] move it over a little bit okay that's probably good enough uh and now we can move this over slightly let's deselect all and take a look at the results okay i can't tell if that's a gap or z fighting so let me okay zero out the y z point two sixteen point two one six eight point two one nine point two two two two five no two two three two two two that looks okay um and now the position 1.275 i think that looks pretty good that looks good okay and now let's take a look over here and see what we've done we've got a little gap so let's let's fix that by making this box just a little bit bigger and moving it over a little bit re-zero you don't have to re-zero i just i just like to do that point eight three no wrong way seven eight seven six six five uh five yeah okay and there is a little bit of a lip here which means that i need to go back to this box and move it over slightly okay there's a slight bit of z fighting over here which i can probably get rid of by just adjusting the size of this slightly down great okay that is the uh that's the surround okay now this is something that i probably should have done um and that all of these boxes are grabbable i should have deleted the gravel from the first box and changed it now i believe there is in neos essentials i think i could be wrong in neos essentials uh in tools not neos essentials essential tools um i think there's like a grabable grabable setter tip um and if i equip it set scalable um so what happens if i click on this that actually sets it as grabbable right so i close i remove the grabable i click on it and that sets it as grabbable and unfortunately there's no set as ungrabbable so that doesn't uh exactly work so so that wasn't it you might ask well can't i create a tool to do that for me and unfortunately no because right now in neos we don't have uh logix access to individual components so so the the fact that this tool was actually able to add a grabbable component is because that tool was written natively in neos so we don't have access to that anymore so okay we will make do by simply deleting all the grabbables so okay now that i've deleted all of the grabables like i should have done in the first place i'm going to go to the surround and add a grabable um so transform interaction grabbable now what i can do deselect all i can simply grab the entire thing and put it wherever i want so in fact i could reset the rotation um i could set the y to zero which as you can see it sort of sinks it in halfway that's because the zero point of all the bricks is halfway through the bricks so you know i could make this point one um actually the the bricks were 0.15 so half of 0.15 is point what is it 0.075 and that would just sort of place it on the ground now there is a way that you can make the ground actually a grabbing surface and then when you put the planter down it will align properly right onto the ground but i'm not going to do that at this point okay so that's our surround and there is our picture of our surround so it uh it looks you know roughly roughly correct again you can see that the original designer sort of filled in these gaps with mortar i'm not going to bother because again that's you know that's probably too much detail for this um but for now let's work on the soil so how are we going to make the soil well the soil it's it's probably um you can see that the soil here was uh 3d uh because it sort of goes down into it it goes down into the surface um i'm not going to do that so instead what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a box um should i use one of these existing boxes no i'll make a completely new box so create new 3d model box okay box is going to go roughly in the center so here's something interesting when you've got something like you know when you've created something like this and you created the parent really early the zero zero point of the surround is going to be well where is the zeros oops where is the zero zero point of the surround [Music] it's roughly over there right so what you can do is you can create pivot at center and what that does is it creates a parent so now if i go up one it says surround pivot and if i look at that pivot that's exactly at the center now of course it's at the center of the brick so but the point is that now i can simply say i can simply call this surround there is the calculation of the center right over there i'm going to reset the scale again i you don't have to but you know it sort of drives me nuts when that happens um so this position uh is actually the center and now the surround is wherever it is so i'm just going to call this sort of surround offset because really what now that is is it's kind of the offset of all of these bricks so which means that if i take this box let me uh open the inspector on the box and i make it part of the surround and i rename it ground get rid of this if i rename this ground you will see that if i reset its position and its rotation it's now basically right in the center of the planter that is because the ground box is relative to the surround box now um reset the scale okay so the next thing i need to do is expand this to sort of fill this space so um the x size let me just secondary click on this so the x size i can actually do this like this so you see these um controls that appear on the top unfortunately if i get too close they disappear but i can click on this one which is the resize control you can see that i can sort of easily resize this i can even make it go all the way almost all the way up to the ends of the bricks sort of like that don't need it so high okay now i can fine tune it by looking at the actual scale now this is the thing um when you're dealing with these solids um you don't want to scale them because that will sort of also scale whatever texture it is you want to play with the size so i'm going to take this and move it to the size okay and now of course it's way too big because it's it got multiplied now i can reset the scale and you can see that the mesh itself so what's happening is the mesh is procedurally generated to be this size as opposed to procedurally generated to be one one one and then stretched by using the scale that will also stretch whatever texture is on it which is not what you want okay let's stick a texture on it so we want a sort of [Music] groundish texture so let's take a look at our neos essentials and see what materials we have to play with do we have dirt no um do we have ground no we do it we do have ground let's take a look at ground what have we got um yeah i have no idea which of these is going to end up looking like dirt um this one looks kind of close ground number 23. again it it turns out to be darker and i don't know whether it's because of the lighting here or not so again what we're going to do is we're going to open up a a we're going to create a new material the tune material i don't know why but i seem to always go with the the tune material i used to always go to the pbs metallic but anyway um now i can open can i open this orb yep okay so here's the texture i'm going to take the texture and grab it into the main texture of this um i may as well take the normal map too there's the height map so yeah so the thing about the height map is that that's what gives it a kind of 3d 3d look but you think you think it would be a thickness map i don't know what we will do let me take deselect let me take ground 23 and put it over here this is my um perspective ground so i'm going to take it and put it into ground and see what it looks like um okay that was unexpected i didn't really expect it to look like that what happens if i take the original and put it in there that actually looks better i mean it's it's dirty i mean not dirty in terms of dirt but dirty in terms of like there's too much stuff in there so let's um let's grab something else and try it okay um that looks okay except it looks a bit unhealthy um can i get it to be browner brownish so again i want to change the color i want to attempt to change the color to something sort of dirt like which is brown that's uh that's a little better i think um yeah i kind of like that so um let's see now uh the normal scale and the height map again that's going to tell us like how 3d it looks so if i change that to something like 0.5 it looks a little more bumpy 0.4 if i change it to like .5 obviously it it doesn't look like anything so i guess 0.02 was pretty good just for fun i'll just change it to 0.03 okay so there it is now you can sort of see that it does kind of fill in the gap here which means that maybe maybe in order to make it look nice i can take my ground mesh and increase it a little in the the red axis which is this axis so three maybe a little more five two point one that's actually pretty good okay um and then in the y-axis uh the z-axis it looks like it just needs a little bit of a nudge so let me take a look in the z-axis so a little bit of a nudge maybe to 2.08 2.1 2.1 because it's square right at least it's supposed to be square okay um that's looking pretty good let me deselect deselect so that i can see oh yeah okay that's not good oh yeah okay that's fine um that's because the uh sizes of the bricks are not exact i mean i can i can you know juke this a little bit over but instead i'm just going to cheat and i'm going to make this 2.09 and i'm going to make this size 2.09 look around go around and yeah okay that's just doing a little bit of a cheat there okay that is my dirt patch so the next thing that we're going to cover are these sticks but one thing that i do want to sort of emphasize is that while we've been doing this we've done a lot of work but we haven't actually saved anything so if you go into session you can hit save changes and that will basically save everything if you want you can hit uh auto save like this um and then change your auto save interval that will actually just you know auto save everything it can be a bit jarring especially if you um um if you're working on something and then all of a sudden there's a sort of like a hitch in the graphics um and and or like you know some frames dropped that's just because it's saving so um you can do that if you don't feel safe or you can just hit save changes and then you know then you know that you're going to get a little hitch so that's just a little uh a little tip all right uh i think the next thing that we want to do is take care of these um these stakes here so there there are two sets of three um there are obviously going to be cylinders so let's go ahead and create a cylinder cylinder okay that is a big fat cylinder we need to make it a thin long boy so we're going to open the inspector remove the grabber from it the grabable uh okay so where are the parameters right here height radius and sides so sides um you see how some of these sides are actually flat this is basically because you don't render perfect circles in 3d you approximate them with a number of sides the more sides you have the closer to a circle it is but of course the more uh polygons you have which means that the harder your gpu has to run to render it so it's always a trade-off and personally i don't care so much so let's make this small let's change the radius to 0.1 okay that's getting closer uh let me just reset the rotation so that the axes are correctly orthogonal okay um let's uh reduce the radius a little more to .05 that's probably still too thick let's try 0.02 that's probably good 0.03 let's see what 0.03 is like and let's see how big should this stake be so let's drive the stake into the ground like that um i'm gonna say it should be just a little bigger like 1.2 now i can raise it up a little bit i think yeah i guess one was okay sure that looks good okay so next thing we need to do is texture this so we need something that looks like bark so let's go ahead and pull out first of all let me take this dirt globe eventually i might actually want to make the dirt a little lighter because you can see that the dirt is kind of almost as light as the bricks um while here i have this sort of like dark coffee you know rich earth sort of color but anyway that's neither here nor there go to the inventory and go to my planter directory and save it okay that is my dirt okay so um inventory neos essentials neos essentials materials okay so we're looking for bark um and bark we've seen before what about wood what's wood chips nah how about just plain old wood what's this dylan's sisson pack wow look at all these bits of wood huh okay uh sure let's try this one okay grab it put it in the material and let's deselect deselect all and that uh that looks interesting i guess um the uv scale in x and y i kind of wanted it to look a little rougher um let me try this material instead and see what that looks like okay i mean it's darker but it's not particularly um it's not particularly rough um how about this material here that's um i can't really tell i think i kind of like the original one this one okay let's uh open it up and see what we can do about this because we know that we can change the height scale which makes things more depthy so how about 0.1 um it's okay it's okay uh let's change the texture scale to two see if that does anything 0.5 oh that looks nice that's looking nice and rough okay yeah i like this okay um sure that looks pretty good i think i like that so let's keep that and now we need to uh duplicate this several times so first i'm going to pull out um let me just click on this and open another inspector and go up a level okay so surround this is the entire thing we are going to take this cylinder and put it in surround and rename the cylinder as a stake great and here is what i'm going to do i'm going to parent the stakes so stake row because basically i'm just going to place three of them and then i'm going to duplicate that entire row and move it so that's why i want to do that okay so here's my stake um i want to duplicate it so duplicate and now here i'm going to move it to say roughly i don't know here that should actually end up roughly in the center so if i take the stake row and reset the position then if i then this stake this middle stake actually ended up in the middle so now i can just sort of move it over move it up and move it this way and then the next stake i know that i can reset its position and now it's directly in the middle okay where did okay let me put some nice even numbers here so along the red axis i want this to be point six it's probably too far 0.55 sure okay and along the y the z axis 0.5 and the y axis is uh wherever it is so i want this other stake to be in line with that so in the x-axis of course it's going to be 0 and in the z-axis it's going to be 0.5 so the x-axis is 0 the y is i'm going to change that but this is 0.5 and let's make this point 45 and the y-axis point 45 okay so that's the second stake now the third stake is basically going to be the first stake reflected around um the middle stake so i'm just going to take this close stake duplicate it and then change x to negative and the reason that works again is that we've defined the stake row to be at the zero zero point so that everything can be sort of um relative to the center of this uh whole patch okay so that's my steak row now i'm just going to duplicate the steak row go up a level and now here you can see that we're going to move this row over to something like that and i guess that looks fine so um the stake row is at 0 0. so i guess the fact that these stakes are at point 55 means that um this steak row should probably or this stake i don't know where should it end up minus 1.1 maybe no i think one was fine that looks good enough okay so those are our steak rows okay and now if we take a look again closely um yeah these stakes are actually um kind of like a little they're not entirely straight um i suppose i could you know rotate some of these stakes to be a little wonky so let's see what that looks like so here's the stake so basically what i'm going to do is i'm going to try to rotate it around the x-axis so the x-axis maybe by 1 degree [Music] this middle one say by i don't know minus 1 degree and in z maybe 0.5 degrees so that it looks a little wonky and odd um and then this stakes say i don't know 0.7 degrees and minus 0.2 degrees oops minus point two degrees maybe point two is too subtle how about one point five yeah okay uh let's go ahead with the second steak let's go ahead with the second steak row so here's the second steak row and um we're not giving it any y rotation because then that would just be you know spinning the spinning the thing so here we're going to make it i don't know 1.6 degrees and 0.5 degrees and then this stake um 1.2 degrees and minus 0.6 degrees and then this final stake um one and one okay let me get rid of this get rid of this okay so now they they look you know a little bit wonky um not quite as wonky as in this picture but you know a little wonky all right next we have these thin sort of cross things uh cross pieces so let's make some cross pieces um they look lighter and they are thinner and they are also basically cylinders so create a new cylinder okay there's our cylinder let's open it up with the inspector and reset the rotation now what we're going to want to do is flip this over 90 degrees so along the z axis that's the blue axis 90 degrees and now we're going to want to change the radius so what was the radius of the stake uh the radius of the stake was 0.03 so this is even thinner say 0.015 that's half as thin maybe even 0.01 let me move this down a bit say over here something like that okay so um let's go ahead and make this cylinder apparent um a child of the steak row itself so there it is now if we look at the cylinder coordinates we can see that the position along the y-axis is 0.73 which is a little unexpected um i thought it would be like zero oh yeah okay so yeah this is an unfortunate consequence of um this thing being rotated so the axis so now so this green axis is not actually correct um this green axis is let's see it's not the green axis it's the x-axis because that's the one that's closest to zero okay so there we go now it's perfectly centered i just need to make it a little bigger so the height changed to say 1.5 it's a little too big 1.2 sure that looks pretty good okay um we move this a little more in so what i'm going to do is i'm going to have this cross piece sort of go into the wood um now in the picture you can see that there are these sort of staples i'm not going to bother with the staples i'm just going to do this all right so cylinder let's just call that cross piece cross piece okay [Music] let's go ahead and texture it so it's going to be basically the same i think the same thing as this bark except it's going to be lighter so um let's go ahead and grab um i think it was this material maybe well we'll make do with this one um let's put it in the here okay let's deselect all now obviously it's um it's not the right color so let's open this up and try to color it so it's going to end up being lighter i'm not sure how to get it to be lighter though maybe i should just use one of these other materials because again um i think what happens is that the albedo texture has a particular color and then maybe you're just multiplying this so um there's a limit to what you can do uh so i'll just take this sort of that looks pretty light oh yeah that looks pretty good okay let's open up the texture and fine tune it a bit so maybe the texture scale could stand to be changed let's see what happens if i change the x to 0.5 how about 0.2 that's looking a little more woody how about point one that's looking even woodier how about .05 that's looking less woody so um i kind of like that maybe we can change the height map to like .05 0.1 0.05 looks okay it doesn't really look quite sticky um is there anything else with like a rougher kind of a texture i mean there's the there's this material orb which is you know dark there's this which is somewhat lighter let's see how that works okay let's see if we can adjust the color on this maybe see i can generally get it to be darker but in terms of lightness basically you don't have a choice so i'm going to ditch that and maybe take a look at this one oh i like those okay i like that okay let's play with the texture a little bit so let's try um changing the x texture scale to 0.5 that's interesting and the y to 0.5 to that's okay i mean unfortunately it just kind of looks like a machined dowel again if i were in blender you know maybe i would make a more interesting stick but again i don't know anything about blender so so that's that okay um let's go ahead and just destroy that the materials are on here anyway let's duplicate the cross piece and drop it down to about there and duplicate the cross piece and drop it down to about there let's go up to the middle cross piece again bring it up a little bit and the top cross piece bring that up a little bit okay that's great so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to copy each of these cross pieces so i'll make a copy and bring it down into the bottom make a copy of this copy bring it down into the bottom and make a copy of the bottom one and bring it down into the bottom okay and then for each cross piece um okay i don't know what happened but um so for each cross piece uh i'm going to change the i don't know what it is is it the y let's see no it's the z so i'm going to move this cross piece to about there that looks fine so what did the z end up being 0.475 how does that look looks okay i mean it could maybe stand to be 0.48 no 0.472 0.47 0.472 sure 0.472 i mean i it's it's kind of hard to place it because again these these uprights are now wonky so um 0.472 so now i just take the other cross pieces and do the same thing 0.472 and this one is now .472 all right um let's play with this by changing the rotation of x to be like one no x doesn't do anything um what about y one degree yeah that's interesting this other cross piece point five degrees and this other cross piece up here i don't know minus 1.3 okay same thing here let's take one cross piece and rotate by one next one by point six and the next one by minus one sure so that they look a little bit wonky and you know sort of handmade okay i think that's good so let's deselect all and take a look at our handiwork i'm going to go into fly mode and look at it from a distance so i mean it looks okay right i grow vegetables in that okay this one ended up being sort of inside um let me just take a look at that it's this top one okay so i suspect that i shouldn't have messed with the y-axis but actually the z-axis so now it looks a little better the other ones are they're okay they're fine okay um let's go ahead and save save changes and sometimes the other thing that i like to do is just go into the inventory and maybe save the work as it is now and you know just give it a version number so version zero and then grab it and hit the plus and there it is there is my surround version zero so i think so i think the next thing that we need to discuss is how to make these plants now in terms of plants you don't really want to make them out of primitives because obviously there's a lot of detail in here that i'm never going to capture with primitives this is something really where you need a pre-made asset now if we go into the inventory and look again at neos essentials and we look at 3d models we can find there are there's nature and under nature we can see some flowers and we can see oh look there's sticks huh well look at that i'm gonna pull out a stick and i'm gonna sort of place it over here how do you think that would look well uh it certainly would look interesting i mean i could scale it let's see how should i scale it um maybe along the x-axis make it a little thinner like point two i don't know wrong axis um is it the y-axis it's both the y and the z-axis so that's i think way too thin about 0.5 let's deselect um yeah i mean that's kind of interesting and thin unfortunately you don't want to use the same stick because if you use the same stick um it's it's going to look ridiculous um i mean it's fine i think if these uprights all look the same because they're all you know pretty detail-less but this thing has details there are these other sticks that i could probably use but in any case um that's not for now what we wanted to do was look for plants um i mean there is a plant but it's not exactly what we're going for so we want something that has like a long stalk with leaves on it um and if we go for flowers well you know you can see that these are basically just tulips so that's not gonna work there's this nature asset pack vines and if we look at that um that's kind of uh interesting but it's more like a bunch of leaves i mean this would be great if this were like you know an overgrown thing with like you know a lot of i don't know grapes or something uh but this is a vine this doesn't really work um and what's this this is sort of like a something that would maybe overhang a brick wall so that's not great low poly mushrooms are useless for us we can look at grass here's some grass these are basically cattails which are extremely dark green but again none of this really suits our purpose the other place that we can look oh there's this vegetation pack um and these are all trees so i mean it's it's nice that there are trees but again not what we're going for okay anything else uh in here well we have um we looked at nature right yeah so that's what that's where we came from um there's open game art assets but if we look at it it's basically just a palm tree so um there's one other place that we can look and that is the community public folders right now it's only the creator jam and creator jam is basically everybody gets together like every weekend or every week and just creates stuff we can look at 3d models and we can see if there's anything sort of like long and stocky um there's nature nature crops ultimate nature pack what does that look like wow that is incredibly low poly and not good uh how about nature crops well well there's this what does that look like oh yeah that's very low poly okay not what we're going for great if you were making a low poly game but you know maybe we're not there's also plants which are basically just cacti there's edited whatever that is it's another cactus scopia um okay i mean that's not really anything there's high poly bushes okay so basically we're out of luck so what i would do at this point is i would go to the website sketchfab.com and i would just start looking for plant models that look something like this long and stocky with with a leaf with leaves on it and then i would import that usually as a gltf file those seem to import best so i'm just going to do that and see what we can end up with so plants i went on sketchfab and chose one let's import it and see how it works okay so we open up the file browser and let's see i put it in where did i put it in not plants because that would be too smart not models from sketch fab that would also be too smart it's um picture frame old battered this thing that thing basic game ready plant that's what it was okay so um now on sketchfab uh there's a lot of for pay models but there are other models that require attribution so when i do import something and i plan on putting it in my public folder i always type in the credits so that i can sort of import them into neos as well so let's open scene.gltf and auto scale and run import and see what happens okay so it's imported it's certainly green and stocky so i kind of like that now this is a typical problem with leaves that i found if you look at this from the top or you know maybe from the bottom you see the leaves but the leaves disappear when you look at them from the bottom and that's because leaves generally use uh dual sided um dual sided materials so um the way to fix this is like this um what you do is you grab your oops you grab your dev tool tip okay um so what we're going to do is we're going to create a new material pbs and instead of the usual which is pbs metallic which is somewhere in here i don't know why i can't see it but you choose pbs dual sided metallic okay and then you open up the plant in the inspector and you open up the material and then you just copy over the albedo texture into the albedo texture the normal map copy it in and there's nothing else here so i'm going to set this aside and now i'm going to take the dual sided material and put it on there okay so now if we look at it we can see that the leaves actually have a bottom now um it does look slightly different which i guess is fine maybe that has to do with some settings let's see so this one here was the original and it's got a blend mode of cutout this one doesn't actually have a blend mode if we do alpha handling there's alpha blend that kind of makes transparent leaves and there's alpha clip which doesn't really look any different from opaque so that has no effect um is there anything else that we can look at smoothness i mean it it all looks the same so um there's an alpha cutoff of 0.5 and there really isn't anything else so i think this is all that we that we get okay so there it is there's the plant now what i also like to do when i get stuff from sketchfab is go up to the root which is usually just called scene.gltf and you're going to see a whole bunch of roots there's no reason for any of this just take the bottom uh object which is the actual mesh and stick it up in the scene if you look at small plant there's nothing there there's nothing there these are just translations and rotations so you can actually just delete all that stuff and now you're left with something much nicer so you're left with a parent and the mesh itself along with the material so let's just call this the mesh mesh and the scene we will call um what was it it was basic game ready plan so i'm just going to call it basic game ready plant okay the other thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go to the mesh and let's see there is actually no grabable on here uh the grabbable is at the top which is just fine there's this tag that says object root that tells that that tells the game somewhere i guess that basic game ready plant is the root of an object and i'm also going to attach a component and you should always do this if you have something that you imported that is um that requires attribution for example creative commons attribution um you go to where is it is it um well is it metadata license okay and then in license you put the credit string so it requires credit and you can export it um and let's go to the credits okay so you see base so this is basically what i typed in so i'm just going to inspect this object and i'm going to go down to the content and go down to the text and simply copy it into the credit string that's it i don't need this anymore and that is something that i can now put in my inventory my inventory my private my public folder under plants okay and now i'm just going to grab this hit plus and now it's there for anybody to use so that's nice so now the second thing that i want to do is we can put this over here it looks pretty good i guess it is kind of uh big i guess so let's see let me grab an inspector again so let's see if i take the mesh and i chan uh what's up here oh okay so here's another issue which is that the um the scale of the top object is uh not not one which i don't really like so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take the mesh which is one one one and i'm just gonna copy what is it point zero zero eight one eight sure point zero zero eight one nine so i'm just going to go .00819 copy those in now of course it's tiny and then i reset the scale of the top perfect okay so now i can just you know rotate it and position it however i like and the scale is just going to be 1. so now for my particular object what i want to do is i want to change the scale reset the scale um so i guess so this is the y-axis up and down so i want to maybe compress x and z let's see what happens if i go to 0.5 in the x and 0.5 in the z okay well i mean that's looking sort of tall and and wispy i think i kind of like that um so you can see that there are actually uh different um different sizes here of of weed and i think that's just down to overall scaling so if i were to take this and make a parent out of it and i'm just going to call this basic game ready plant so the reason that i'm doing that is unfortunately when you make a parent it transfers the scale to the parent and also the rotation let me reset the rotation um so that the child has basically a null transform so in other words zero position zero rotation and scale of one uh that's not really what i wanted um what i wanted was for sort of the the basic uh plant to have point five one and point five so let's do that 0.5 1 and 0.5 and then this can reset the scale now what i can do is i can simply scale all of these numbers by the same amount to see what happens so for example let's suppose i go to oh i don't know 0.8 okay so that just makes a smaller plant but in the same proportions so that's what i was talking about when i said that i wanted the scale to be applied to the child so this looks nice i can also maybe make it like 1.2 oops 1.2 okay so that makes a kind of a bigger one so maybe with the the bigger one i also maybe want to drop the scale to like i don't know 0.8 you know just to just to make it look i don't know roughly um maybe make it look a little thinner and stragglier i don't know i mean this is fine so the point is that i want to make a bunch of these um so what i'm going to do first of all i'm going to take surround v0 and i'm going to call it v1 okay so now when i save it to my inventory i'll have a v0 and a v1 um the next thing that i'm going to do is let's see put this plant into the surround so because i know that i'm going to have a lot of plants i'm going to make a child and i'm just going to call it flax so this will be all of the flax so now i'm going to take this basic game ready plant and i'm going to stick it in flex now i can go into flax and copy the plant and now i can move this to like a different location so why can't i move this to a different location i'm whoops that's okay the ground is grabbable that's not good undo grab objects let's go to the ground and remove the grabable okay so uh yeah now i can actually move the plant around okay so i can put one say here make a copy now i'm going to change the scale down to like say one one and one and now i'm going to move that say here and now i'm going to make a copy and i'm going to move the copy out to here and over here okay maybe i'll rotate it a little bit so you know give it a little bit of uh rotation maybe a little more okay so it doesn't look so so regular same thing with this plant maybe i'll do 45 here okay so this is looking actually um pretty pretty nice uh let's create another small plant like like that one over there so i'm going to copy this and give us a teeny little 0.5 plant where is it it's over there it's so cute okay let's do another one and maybe move it down over there so we can see that the designer put some flax plants outside maybe we can do that so let's create a new one and make this like i don't know 0.7 okay and maybe move that over there say and let's do it again and move this here this is fine let's rotate it by fine 56. okay let me deselect deselect all and use fly to take a look at how my flax planter is looking it's looking pretty good i'm liking it okay now one of the things that i can't show you is the uh effect of the game uh the minigame when it's actually running um but hopefully you saw it in the beginning in the introduction where the flax plants actually sort of fade in in the actual game i think there are like two lev two layers of flax plants so you get some flax plants and then you get the rest of the flax plants we're just going to have one layer because that that just shows the principle of the thing so if i go into the game ready plant and i go into the mesh and then i go into the material which of course i have open here let me just close it and reopen it just in case so what we want to do is uh basically take the alpha from zero to one in order to have it fade in so how do we do that and this is the problem i think with the metallic map is that if you have an albedo color say let's try this um so here's the alpha now if i bring it down to zero you see how nothing happens so that's certainly not going to help same thing with the emissive color because those are colors just on top of the albedo texture so that just doesn't help any there's alpha handling so there's opaque there's alpha blend which does make it look different but also i think the leaves are transparent there's alpha clip which will clip i think the albedo texture but there's no point in doing that i mean you can you can sort of see that um at some point it disappears well that's because if you look at the albedo texture itself you can see that there's transparency over here and i guess the alpha layer sort of gradually blends out so you're seeing sort of part of the edge of the leaf where the alpha gets clipped so that doesn't help and then there's and then that's it that's all you get um so this isn't really a great shader um or or yeah i guess it's a shader or material or whatever it isn't really a great one to work on for this so instead what i'm gonna do is i'm going to create a new material and i'm going to create this tune material again one of my go-to materials now i'm going to copy the albedo texture to the main texture we have a normal map so i copy it there that's all that we have so this is my tune material so let's go to um let's pick this front plant see if i can i think it was the first one i put down yeah so this is the the front plant let me replace its material with this uh tune material okay so you can sort of see that there really isn't that much of a difference it did lighten up slightly but now we can see what i can do with this let me grab the material what i can do with this is somewhere the color i think is it the color can i take the alpha down no that doesn't help um there is some place else that i can do okay maybe it's uh maybe it's blend mode multiply additive transparent alpha that doesn't really do anything z right on that doesn't do anything cut out again that doesn't do anything and opaque okay so none of these are really doing anything so i thought that what i could do somehow is [Music] make this appear and disappear by using an alpha let me do a little bit of research and see how i can actually get this to work okay so apparently the key was to turn the blend mode to alpha z right to on i'm not sure what off does but then what you can do is you can change the alpha up and down and it fades in and out so that's basically that so that's how to do it um so what i can do now is i can copy this material that's this one over here to all of the other plants all of the other meshes and i guess i should have done this before so that all the copies would have the same um thing but that's okay there are only a few of these okay um i think that's all of them so now if i change the material we can see that all of them fade out and all of them fade in so the idea is that when you first plant the uh the flax bed on the ground nothing happens after a certain amount of time the weeds fade into the weeds the flax plants fade into existence isn't that cool all right so that's that now the next thing that we need to do is find some sort of a violet looking flower to stick on the tops of these now i suspect what what i'm going to do is i'm probably just going to delete all of these except one of them stick the flower on top and that way i can scale the entire thing again so you know all this work was just you know in preparation to see how things looked i really like the way this is looking so let's go and see if we can find a violet flower now we probably will not find it again in neos essentials because we looked before for plants and we didn't really find any but let's just take another look nature flowers again these are all tulips um and you know if if i could you know maybe i would take one of these and just extract the top but again that would be blender work and i don't do that so let's see it's not going to be under mushrooms what's under ocean wow it's um okay well it's just a shell all right that was fun uh trees vegetation pack again those are just trees the nature assets i think we're all low poly um so we don't find anything here and we're not going to find anything i believe in any of these other things nope so if we go back and we look in the community public folders creator jam 3d models nature crops stylized trees and ultimate nature pack which was low poly nature crops um well how bad does this look i mean yes it's low poly but if i shrink it down to something like this size i don't think that's a bad thing i really don't think that's so bad let's run with it um it's a little on the dark side and we can fix that by using the tune shader so let's go ahead and do that okay let's just stick it on top here let's open up a an inspector and look at the texture okay yeah so this is this is basically um a mesh it says cactus crop cactus crop dot fbx there's the object root so the root node has nothing in it why do we even need that i don't know cactus crop okay so it's basically a mesh and this is the um this is the material again it's not suitable because we actually wanted to um use something that we could fade in and out which means the tune material so this is just a color so i'm going to keep that open i'm going to make a new material new material oops new materials tune get this ball out of the way great and i'm just going to copy the numbers over so okay so there's my material i'm going to close this out close this out apply the material and there it's a slightly lighter but now i can simply modify it to kind of the the brighter um sort of lavender-ish color kind of like that i like that okay and now of course if i mess with the alpha you can see that the if i change the blend mode to alpha we can see that if i change the alpha it will fade out and fade in okay so now the question is where do i put it on the plant so i can take the plant uh take this thing and maybe stick it like right over here now it is where it is because it's not parented to the plant so what i'm going to do is first of all like i said i'm going to delete like i said i'm going to delete all of the plans all of my hard work is gone okay and now i'm just left with this main plant um so i can take this and stick it under flax no stick it under the plant okay so um let's see the position in terms of x and y should i think be zero in x and z oh that's interesting apparently that right there is the center of the plant i actually wanted it over here so i guess i'm just going to have to move it myself might be a little down yeah yeah that looks pretty good oh that's unfortunate look at that from the underneath um from the from the other side the leaves have no underside i believe there is a way to fix that i think there is a way to fix that and the way to fix that is you go into the material and let's see where was it i really thought that there was something somewhere that let you um yeah there it is so what you do is you you grab the texture you move it away and then you press the trigger and that gives you this thing right so let me do that again just like that and there is a i think there's a selection to make it double-sided somewhere or maybe not i'm pretty sure there was make square flip for alpha colored alpha ring alpha really no there isn't one i could have sworn that there was okay so again i am going to have to do some research oh maybe it wasn't that it was the mesh i think it was the mesh right so because it's the mesh that's the problem so if i go into where's the mesh here it is static mesh on mesh so i'll drag it out and now make dual sided that's what i was looking for so if i click make dual sided now i can close this because i just made it dual sided and now when i look aha the leaves have two sides so that is very definitely um a key to doing that how did i learn all this i asked on the discord and eventually i got some answers um sometimes some people come in to help me with things when i ask um or when they offer and that's how i learned the the tune material thing so um okay so now that i have uh this basic game ready plant i'm just going to call it stock um so i'm just going to call it hang on i need to i need to move because i'm getting close to objects in my room how about how about here great okay so um do i need this i don't think i do i can get rid of this i've got other material balls that i don't really need okay so here's my plant i'm going to rename this flax stock so it's a little less generic okay so now i can make a copy of it copy and then move it somewhere like say there and give it a little rotation make another copy and this time we are going to uh scale it to one one so that makes it a little bit bigger and we can even do that right put it right next to the plant and give it a little say negative 15 degree twist okay let's make another plant and we'll make this one a tiny one 0.5.5 and where should this one go how about we put it right over there and we'll give it another twist say 10 degrees uh we'll take the same sized plant and say put it out there and give it a twist of five degrees um let's let's give it like a bigger twist like minus 95 degrees okay we'll make another flax stock and this time we will scale it up to 0.8 0.8 so it's not quite as tall we can stick it over there and give it a 100 degree twist and let's have one more flak stock let's see how many that is seven let's put one over there and maybe make it like point nine by point nine by 0.9 and twisted by minus 20 and one more so that would be eight total okay let's stick this say over there let's make it a bit small so 0.6.6.6 and say 25 degrees okay so now if i go into the flaxstock so we have two materials one on the stock itself and one on the uh one on the flower and we would have to change the alphas on both of those materials simultaneously at the same rate from zero to one um but that's what we will do with the logics for now what i just wanted to do was make the the static plants with no game logic so this is looking pretty good i'll look at it from all angles yeah i'm kind of liking that um there is kind of a bare patch to over here um you know what i don't really care all that much again i'm just sort of putting the fundamentals down and you can you know fill in your own little flax patch okay so that's the flax um the next thing that we need to do is look at the weed now the weed um i found something that should be useful so let's open up my inventory and we'll go to the public folder again this is something i found on sketchfab plants um so there's this plant over here okay so it's got a different kind of leaf and if we open it up in the inspector and we can see it's pbs metallic so again we're going to have to replace that so we may as well just do that now so i'm going to create a new material tune copy over the texture is there anything else nope i mean it does say that there's a metallic map but of course i don't think this has metallic so we'll just leave it like that um i don't really care about the emissive color it's it's very low anyway okay uh let's go ahead and apply this material to the plant and see what happens okay so it's sort of lightened up i guess the centers of it kind of got lighter and that may be due to the metallic metallic map that is actually here you can sort of see that the metallic map has little leaves on it um if i put that on the metallic gloss map let's see what happens not a whole lot um so i can actually just clear that because that really didn't have much of an effect at all um on the other hand there's this metallic maybe i have to do this and turn up the metallic well that actually does something doesn't do a lot that i like reflectivity how about let's make it like this metallic i just don't like it i just don't like it one bit so um yeah i'm just gonna clear that yeah it didn't it didn't really seem to have an effect um there is a mission map matcap i have no idea what that is um how about i just play with it and see what happens wow that wasn't very good at all um there's the occlusion map which i don't think will be very good or do anything apparently how about the outline mask doesn't do anything i don't think any of this is going to do anything not even the normal map there is a normal map huh there's something in the normal map okay i don't think that really did much it's okay this is fine so let's just close this and this okay so um so now the thing is let me just make sure that it is double-sided it is excellent so i don't have to apply that correction i'm going to go up to the top this is plant comma outdoor there's the license on it uh there's stem 0. now i want to make it look weedy so if i take this deselect it take it and stick it over here i'll stick it over here i want that plant not only to look different in color from these plants but also a little sickly so what i'm going to do is first of all i'm going to see if i can change the color so i can sort of make it maybe a little more brown maybe i mean it's oh look at that oops that is actually quite brown uh i'm in fly mode let me get out of fly mode okay now i'm on the ground um so that's actually quite brown um which is nice um it's kind of dark so let me see if i can lighten it up a little bit so you can lighten it up by applying this multiplier now this is also emission so if i lighten it up a lot you can see that it practically glows that's not what i'm going for so i'm going for something maybe like that and if you look at the numbers you'll see that the numbers are actually higher than one again i'm not really sure what that does but yeah this looks pretty sick so and sick in a bad sense okay now let's go to the um top level now we can see that the plant has point zero zero zero five yeah that's just not good so let me go and parent it um let me apply the point zero zero zero blah blah blah point zero zero zero five i think was five i think this was also five and i think this was seven and let me go here and reset the scale great okay so now i can actually scale this so maybe i want to stretch this in the y okay that looks kind of weedy that's a weed right oops undo that okay so the problem is that i had the grabable on the outdoor plant and also the object root the object root should be at the root of the object let me change grabbable and remove it let me call this weed and attach i'm not going to attach a grabable to it in fact i should probably take the grabable off of these flax plants too if um if i had one yeah i will i will do that later um so now i don't have the grabba ball i should mark it with the object root just for good practice so i think that's transform tagging now it's just transform object root so that marks this as the object root so there's my weed um let's go to the material and make sure that i can fade it in and out so the blend mode has to be alpha for that to happen and now if i go to alpha we can see that it fades in and out so that's good that's definitely what i want so i think the idea is that um let me take the weed and stick it in okay before i do that what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a child and i'm just going to call it weeds i'm going to take the weed and stick it under weeds there we go so now if i duplicate the weed and then move it somewhere like say there um i can even make it a different size like say um 0.8 point eight two point maybe one point eight so it's slightly smaller um i can duplicate the weed and maybe which one is the weed that i duplicated um okay let me deselect everything okay so there's the a weed ah there's another weed um that's odd why is the center point of the weed over there i don't know why i have no idea why doesn't really matter there's a weed there's a weed okay so now i will take this weed and say move it over here let's move it over there sure okay i will change the size to 1.1 1.1 and 1.5 well 1.9 so it's sort of slightly bigger but i don't know stouter or something a little a little tubby um okay so those are my weeds and again the idea is that all the weeds would their alpha would go from zero to one uh simultaneously now in the game you you will be able to grab one of these weeds so of course it's gonna it's gonna have to have a grabbable on it and the moment you grab it they will disappear and that sort of simulates picking the weeds and you should be able to grab any of these weeds and they will they will all go away and that that's sort of like the way that you pick a weed okay so those are the weeds now the final thing is let's deselect all okay so there is my weedy uh garden the next thing is how do i make a seed now i have a seed here so this is kind of a seed looking thing and the idea is that they would sort of grow on the plant somewhere and then you should be able to just pick it and you will get one seed so maybe put it on all of the plants so that you can pick any one of them and that is the equivalent of harvesting the seeds so um i mean this looks pretty good so maybe i'll just go with it um the problem is that it's not really um straight up and down so i'll probably have to rotate it so let me go ahead and select it let me select this rotation thing and now i can just sort of rotate so that this stock is roughly straight up and down and i think it's not quite okay i think that's okay so now let me deselect it and grab it so it's sort of appear right over there and then you can just pick it so that's kind of nice so what i'll do is i'll just take the seed and add it to each of these flowers you don't have to be here to watch that and i'll do it the same way i will create a child i will call these seeds and i will take this seed go to its root there it is um i'm going to keep the grabbable because i know i'm going to need grabbable on it at some point and then i'm going to simply put it under seeds then i'll just copy it move it to the correct locations maybe scale some of them and again the alphas can can the alphas get moved um yeah so the material on this is already a tuned material and the interesting thing is that the tune material is in the object itself as a component and that's important we are going to want to do that except we're going to want to take this material and move it out of the seed and put it say under seeds that way we can refer to it using logics and then move the alpha up and down so it would be a kind of a shared material um so that is uh that's pretty much that for the static portion of the game so we sort of have all the pieces that we need so next we're going to talk about how to write the logics to turn this into an actual game