 Hi, I'm Zachary, and this is Nios. I'm going to show you how I built a sort of mini-game that was taken from A Tale in the Desert, linked down below for that, and how I built it completely in Nios. So let's take a look at the game first. Okay, so let me spawn out the mini-game from my inventory. Okay, so we can see that it's this 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, the 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 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 flax seed. Now let me also show you what happens 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. What this represents is sort of a bundle of harvested flax. And if we look at an image from the actual Tale 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 pretty much that. So that's the game. I thought it was interesting because it was pretty self-contained, aside from an inventory system, which I didn't bother to implement. 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 blue. Okay, so let's reproduce this. It kind of looks like some cones. So if we open up the inventory, and we go into Essential Tools, and grab the dev tooltip, and let us create a new 3D model. So these are all basically the solids that we can create. So there's box, capsule, and so on. So there's cone. So let's create a cone. All right, so it has created just this gray cone. That's fine to start with. So what we're going to do is let's start with the bottom. So I'm going to secondary select, 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 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 0.2, and the height to something like 0.2. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's okay. So the next thing that I want to do is, this is kind of a boring 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. So let's try... Bark is usually my go-to for sort of linear features. 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 render with the other. Okay, and that's what we end up with. 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 the other part. The other part of the bottom. So it's another cube. 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, because I want it to have basically the same material, I can just make a copy of this 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 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 bottom. So I just need to extend the height. So let's call it... I don't know, is it 0.5? More. 0.8. More. How about just 1? Well, it definitely needs to be more than that. 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 0.2. Well, that's no good. What about 0.05? Okay, that's certainly getting closer. 0.07. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Okay, so one of the issues, though, is that 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. Just say 0.8. Now let me... 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, let me change the top radius again to something like 0.1. Okay, yeah, this is looking a little closer to the proportions that I want. Although the bottom now looks a little... It doesn't look so great. So let me go to the bottom. So, and this is, you know, this is a lot of working in neos is just, you know, trying different things, seeing what looks nice. So let's see. 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. Let's just leave it like that. Okay, let's check the bottom side. It doesn't look like anything's going through. So I think that's pretty good. Now, the other problem is that I... 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 grabbable, 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, I should be able to grab the entire thing, but I'm not. Why is that? 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, maybe it's because I have this selected. Yeah, okay, that's right. It was trying to grab the arrows and grab the dev tooltip 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, 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 the short cones look okay. I think I'll just leave it. It doesn't have to be exact to this picture. 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 going to do is I'm going to 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 2. Okay, this is looking a little more linear. So let's change it to 5. This is looking very linear. 7, 8. Okay. So let's go with 8. So let's change the Y to... Let's go down first. Okay, that just makes it a little blurry. Let's change it to 2. No. Okay, so I'll stick with 1. 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. The somewhat, I don't know, blue-ish. Sure, that looks okay. Okay, so that's kind of the effect that I'm going for. I really don't like these 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'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. Yeah, that's just not looking very great. I can change the texture offset because I think what's happening is the blotches are on one side. So if I change this to like 0.5, yeah, that just doesn't work. Okay, so I can maybe find something else. So let's try, instead of bark, let's go with what? Wood. Okay. 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 looks even worse. Let's not do that. Let's try what? Wood siding? Okay, this has linear features. Let's try this one and see what it looks like. Okay, that's actually the wrong orientation, but let's see if we can fix that. Can we fix that? Can we fix the orientation of the material? It's not obvious to me how to do that, unfortunately. So, now obviously 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. No. Okay, let's try this kind of 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. 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 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, hidey-er. So you see how it sort of has this kind of, well, maybe you can't see it, but in 3D it does sort of have this effect that these are actual, like, stocks 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 NEO's tools and I can go to the material gun. That's the mesh tip, material tip. Okay, so let me equip 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 de-quip 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. Let's see if we can... 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 once. So I didn't actually need this material ball. Okay, and let me go ahead and de-select 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, a rope, a circular rope is nothing but a torus and we know we have that. So let's go ahead and create a new 3D model, a torus. There is our torus. Let me stick it roughly there. So let me double-select it and open the inspector, grab the torus and stick it in the bundle and then I can just call it 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 I can grab it, I can move it around. The pieces of the bundle, you can see are basically at 0, 0. This one is not at 0, 0. In fact, I can change these numbers to 0. 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 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, and I can change the x to 0 and the z to 0, and now it's perfectly centered. 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 band itself, and the minor radius is basically the thickness of the hose, or the rope. So first I'm going to change the minor radius to something that's more rope-like. Yeah, that looks good. And now I'm going to change the major radius to something that is closer to this cone. 0.1, does that look good? Yeah, it could be a little bit bigger. So let me go ahead and make it 0.11. Sure, that looks great. That looks good. 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. I think it could stand to be just a little bigger. So let me change the major radius to 0.12. 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. I think it's okay. 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 X2 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. Do I want to change the coloration? Well, let's take a look. Oops, can I color it something else? I mean, it's pretty dark as it is. 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 brighter color, but 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 the X and the Z and the scale are not exact, you can reset the scale to just 111, 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, 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 in the top half. There we go. Okay, so 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 1.405. I can still sort of see a little bit of overlap. 1.406, 407. Again, I'm just eyeballing it. This looks good. 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 X, Y, Z coordinates of the bundle as a whole, you'll see that Y is at 0.1. And I think that is basically the half over here. What you could do is you could add another parent and then, like, move the bundle, offset it so that the bottom is sitting on the ground. But, you know, because the ground is just going to be zero, I guess it doesn't really matter. So that's our flax. And 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. Inventory. I'm going to make a directory. And I'm just going to call it planter. Okay. Now I'm in there. Now I'm going to 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. These kind of look like pillars, don't they? That's 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 Tale in the Desert game. So let me just show you that. So let's see. 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 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 needed vertical. So I just went into my image editing program, GIMP, and I rotated it 90 degrees to give us this. 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, I'm not sure how you pronounce this, shessi, shessi, shessi, shessi, ziazi. Tune. So I'm just going to use this. Oops, did I 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, 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, an emission map. I have no idea what any of this stuff does because again I don't really have any 3D art background. So I have no idea what this is. 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 eh. So let's see. I'm going to bring up my inspector for one of these flax bundles. Let's see which one it is. It's 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 edge when it wraps around. You can try fixing that by, well, I don't know if you can fix that. But in any case, I think this kind of looks like a bundle of things. You know, even this looks better. It looks like a bundle of colored straw. So let's just go with that. How about the other texture axis, the Y? What happens if I go like 0.5? Looks interesting. I don't know, I guess I kind of like this better. 1. What happens if I go to 2? That looks even more interesting. How about 1.5? Sure, let's just keep it like that. Okay, now that I've done that, I've got my material orb and I can go on to 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, 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. 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 not perfect. We can see a little bit of a seam, but if you go a little bit farther away, maybe you can't see it so well. 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. Nobody's going to 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 Logix 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 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 kind of this kind of sandstone thing, bricks around the outside here. 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 using 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 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 texture that you put on the box. So I'm first going to size this approximately. So let's see, let's just put it on the ground and you can see that the grid in this sort of grid world is, if this is a one across, then the major grid is one by one and the minor grid is point two by point two. So that's kind of convenient. So let's do that. Let's change the rotation to zero. So that it's not actually rotated so that it's sort of aligned with these things. And then for the bricks, let me just take a look at this. So we need to decide how big this is and how big this is going to be based on how big you are. If I look down at myself, 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 if this is two units across, then how big are each of these bricks? So let's say one, two, that's three. That's three and a half full bricks. So 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. 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 nine plus nine. Enter that puts nine on the stack and a nine plus. So basically this is two. Get rid of this and equip this. Okay. So it's going to be two divided by three and a half. So two, enter three point five divided by. So each of these bricks is point 57. Let's just make it point six to make things easy. Okay. So let's get rid of this. Okay. So each of these bricks is point six 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 point six. There we go. How big are these bricks? Well, they kind of look like they are about one quarter of that. So point three point one five say. So that means in the X direction, it's going to be point one five. Okay. So that's my brick here. And how tall are these things? 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 point one five. 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 sandstone? There's rock. Okay. I mean, this could be something. 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. This is also kind of grayish. All right. So let's try this and then we'll see if we can just sort of modify the results. 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 stony color. Sandstone is a little more yellow, I guess. How about that? I guess that's okay. I'm not too pleased with it. We can, again, we can change the, 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. Again, I don't really know anything about, 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, maybe we don't want scale UV with size. And then in the Y, what's like this do? That's kind of interesting. I'm really not happy with this. Okay, so we're not going to do that. 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 it's interesting that it sort of shows up as this albedo texture here. Okay, here's an idea. Let's go with the, let's make a new material. And use ZZTune and just take the texture and put it over here. Take the normal map and put it there. 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, the color is not quite the same. I don't really understand why blend mode, multiply, transparent alpha. Again, I don't know what any of this stuff does. 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. 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, I don't know, let's call it the surround. Okay. That way the surround is wherever it is and the box. This is the 00 point right there, that little yellow dot right there. That's the 00 point of the planter. So let's 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, 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 X, no, the blue axis is Z. So instead of Z being 0.6, I'm going to make it like 0.5, what, 0.5, 6, 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, here's the position. Here's this box, 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 0 and 0 and let's take the Z being also 0, okay. That puts it there. Then I can take this box and put it at 0, 0 and then the Z should be at, remember it was 0.6. So if I do that, I mean that gap is kind of huge, isn't it? 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 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 brick. 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 0.59, instead of 0.6, it's going to be 0.3. So let me change this to 0.3, 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 will end up roughly there with a little gap. So let's make this 1.65. Is that reasonable? Sure. And then this would be 0 and this would be 0. Again the reason why they are not exactly 0 is due to floating point errors, which is a problem if you actually go out like, you know, 10,000 units, these errors will actually start adding up because they will multiply. Okay, 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. 6, 2, 6, 5, 6, 6, 6, 5, 5, sure. Okay, I think that works, works out a little better. Okay, so D, deselect, 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, rotate, 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, 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, well, obviously Y should be 0. 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 height, 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 it, an inspector, okay. So now we need to make this smaller. Now, unfortunately, I can't just drag one side. So the size is in the Z-axis is probably going to be more like 0.4 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 trying to get at because 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. We do need to move this over a little bit because you can see that there's a little bit of a, 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, 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, 0.28, and maybe one more, 0.29, 0.295. Yeah, that looks fine. Okay. Great. So now I just need to duplicate this side, duplicate, and rotate it. By, close, there's the duplicate, 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 it over a bit, grab my inspector, and take a look at where we ended up. Deselect, take a look at it. 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 to 1.55, nope, 1.51, 1.505, 1.505, 1.505, 8. Good enough. And the position here, 1.945, 7, 8, 9. Let's see how that looks, I think, 5. Okay, that looks good. Good enough. Now again, I could probably have calculated the exact sizes and positions of these things, but why bother? If I can just eyeball it once and it's done. Okay, now we're going to take this side, and now, okay, so I think the problem is if I duplicate this, and now I rotate this by 90, okay, and I move it over, or we can see that we're going to run into Z-fighting on the other side. So, actually it's like this, right? Is that correct? I'm not sure that's entirely correct. Oh yeah, right, it's supposed to look like this, and the problem is that this block was the one that 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 .45, and I'm going to move it over a little bit. It needs to be smaller, .42, I think it needs to be a little bigger, .44. Actually, how big was this other block here? .44, okay, that's good. Let us go ahead and move it over a little bit, okay? That's probably good enough, 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 a Z-fighting, so let me, okay, zero out the Y. Z, .216, .216, .219, .22, .225, no, .223, .222, that looks okay. 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 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 like to do that. .83, oh, wrong way, .78, .76, .65, .5. 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, that's the surround. Okay, now this is something that I probably should have done, and that all of these boxes are grabbable. I should have deleted the grabble from the first box and changed it. Now I believe there is in NEO's Essentials, I think, I could be wrong, in NEO's Essentials, in tools, not NEO's Essentials, essential tools, I think there's like a grabbable, grabbable setter tip. And if I equip it, set Scalable, so what happens if I click on this, that actually sets it as grabbable, right? So I close, I remove the grabbable, I click on it and that sets it as grabbable, and unfortunately there's no set as un-grabbable, so that doesn't exactly work. 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 NEO's we don't have logics access to individual components. So the fact that this tool was actually able to add a grabbable component is because that tool was written natively in NEO's. So we don't have access to that anymore. So, okay, we will make do by simply deleting all the grabbables. Okay, now that I've deleted all of the grabbables, like I should have done in the first place, I'm going to go to the surround and add a grabbable. 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. I could set the y to zero, which as you can see it sort of syncs 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 0.1. Actually 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 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 probably too much detail for this. But for now, let's work on the soil. So how are we going to make the soil? Well, the soil, it's probably, you can see that the soil here was 3D because it sort of goes down into the surface. I'm not going to do that. So instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a box. 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 00 point of the surround is going to be, well, where is the 00 point of the surround? 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. 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, you don't have to, but it sort of drives me nuts when that happens. So this position 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 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. Reset the scale. Okay. So the next thing I need to do is expand this to sort of fill this space. So 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 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. When you're dealing with these solids, 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 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 111 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 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? Nope. Do we have ground? No. We do have ground. Let's take a look at ground. What have we got? Yeah. I have no idea which of these is going to end up looking like dirt. This one looks kind of close. Ground number 23. Again, 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... We're going to create a new material, the tune material. I don't know why, but I seem to always go with the tune material. I used to always go to the PBS metallic. But anyway, now I can open... Can I open this orb? Yeah. Okay. So here's the texture. I'm going to take the texture and grab it into the main texture of this. 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 look. But you think it would be a thickness map? I don't know. So what we will do... Let me take... Let me take ground 23 and put it over here. This is my perspective ground. So I'm going to take it and put it into ground and see what it looks like. 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 dirty. Not dirty in terms of dirt, but dirty in terms of there's too much stuff in there. So let's grab something else and try it. Okay, that looks okay, except it looks a bit unhealthy. Can I get it to be brown-ish? So again, I want to attempt to change the color to something sort of dirt-like. Which is brown. That's a little better, I think. Yeah, I kind of like that. So let's see now. The normal scale and the height map, again, that's going to tell us 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 0.5, obviously 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 red axis. Which is this axis. So 3, maybe a little more. 5, 2.1, that's actually pretty good. Okay. And then in the Y axis, 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, that's looking pretty good. Let me deselect. Deselect so that I can... Oh, yeah. Okay, that's not good. Oh, yeah. Okay, that's fine. That's because the sizes of the bricks are not exact. I mean, 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 autosave like this, and then change your autosave interval. That will actually just autosave everything. It can be a bit jarring, especially if you're working on something and all of a sudden there's a sort of like a hitch in the graphics, or like, you know, some frames dropped. That's just because it's saving. So 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 tip. Alright, I think the next thing that we want to do is take care of these stakes here. So there are two sets of three. There are obviously going to be cylinders, so let's go ahead and create a cylinder. Okay, that is a big fat cylinder. We need to make it a thin longboy. So we're going to open the inspector, remove the grabber from it, the grabbable. Okay, so where are the parameters right here? Height, radius, and sides. So sides, 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 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. Let me just reset the rotation so that the axes are correctly orthogonal. Okay, let's reduce the radius a little more to 0.05. 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. 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 1 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. 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 inventory, neos essentials, materials. Okay, so we're looking for bark, 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 Cison pack? Look at all these bits of wood. Huh, okay. Sure, let's try this one. Okay, grab it, put it in the material, and let's deselect. Deselect all, and that looks interesting, I guess. The UV scale in X and Y, I kind of wanted it to look a little rougher. Let me try this material instead and see what that looks like. Okay, I mean it's darker, but it's not particularly rough. How about this material here? That's, I can't really tell. I think I kind of like the original one, this one. Okay, let's 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. How about point one? It's okay. Let's change the texture scale to two, see if that does anything, point five. Ooh, that looks nice. That's looking nice and rough. Okay, yeah, I like this. Sure, that looks pretty good. I think I like that. So let's keep that, and now we need to duplicate this several times. So first, I'm going to pull out, 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. 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 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 0.6, probably too far, 0.55, sure. Okay, and along the z-axis, 0.5, and the y-axis is 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 0.45, and the y-axis 0.45. Okay, so that's the second stake. Now the third stake is basically going to be the first stake reflected around 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 00 point, so that everything can be sort of relative to the center of this whole patch. Okay, so that's my stake row. Now I'm just going to duplicate the stake 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 the stake row is at 00. So I guess the fact that these stakes are at 0.55 means that this stake row should probably, or this stake, I don't know, where should it end up? Minus 1.1, maybe? I think 1 was fine. It looks good enough. Okay, so those are our stake rows. Okay, and now if we take a look again closely, yeah, these stakes are actually kind of like a little, they're not entirely straight. 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. This middle one say by, I don't know, minus 1 degree and in Z maybe 0.5 degrees. So that looks a little wonky and odd. And then this stakes say, I don't know, 0.7 degrees and minus 0.2 degrees. Whoops. Minus 0.2 degrees. Maybe 0.2 is too subtle. How about 1.5? Yeah. Okay. Let's go ahead with the second stake. Let's go ahead with the second stake row. So here's the second stake row and we're not giving it any y rotation because then that would just be, you know, 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, 1.2 degrees and minus 0.6 degrees. And then this final stake, 1 and 1. Okay. Get rid of this. Get rid of this. Okay. So now they look, you know, a little bit wonky. 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, cross pieces. So let's make some cross pieces. They look lighter and they are thinner and they are also basically cylinders. So create a new cylinder. Okay. There is 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? 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 let's go ahead and make this cylinder a parent, a child of the stake 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. I thought it would be like zero. Oh, yeah. Okay. So yeah. This is an unfortunate consequence of this thing being rotated. So this green axis is not actually correct. 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. 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. 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. 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 let's go ahead and grab. I think it was this material maybe. Well, we'll make do with this one. Let's put it in the here. Okay. Let's deselect all. Now obviously 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, I think what happens is that the albedo texture has a particular color and then maybe you're just multiplying this. So there's a limit to what you can do. 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 0.1? That's looking even woodier. How about 0.05? That's looking less woody. So I kind of like that. Maybe we can change the height map to like 0.05. 0.105 looks okay. It doesn't really look quite sticky. Is there anything else with like a rougher kind of a texture? I mean 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 this. Okay. I like that. Okay let's play with the texture a little bit. So let's try changing the X texture scale to 0.5. That's interesting. And the Y to 0.52. 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 that's that. Okay 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. Okay I don't know what happened but so for each cross piece 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 kind of hard to place it because again these uprights are now wonky. So 0.472. So now I just take the other cross pieces and do the same thing. 0.472 and this one is now 0.472. Alright let's play with this by changing the rotation of X to be like 1... No. X doesn't do anything. What about Y? 1 degree? Yeah that's interesting. This other cross piece 0.5 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 1. Next one by 0.6 and the next one by minus 1. 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. So 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 on that. This one ended up being sort of inside. 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 actually the Z axis. So now it looks a little better. The other ones are okay. They're fine. Okay 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 0 and then grab it and hit the plus. And there it is. There is my surround version 0. 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 premade 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 going to pull out a stick and I'm going to sort of place it over here. How do you think that would look? Well it certainly would look interesting. I mean I could scale it. Let's see how should I scale it? Maybe along the x-axis make it a little thinner like 0.2. Oh wrong axis. 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. 0.5. Let's deselect. 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 it's going to look ridiculous. I mean it's fine. I think if these uprights all look the same because they're all pretty detail-less but this thing has details. There are these other sticks that I could probably use but in any case that's not for now. What we wanted to do was look for plants. 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. And if we go for flowers well you can see that these are basically just tulips so that's not going to work. There's this nature asset pack, vines and if we look at that that's kind of interesting but it's more like a bunch of leaves. I mean this would be great if this were like an overgrown thing with like a lot of, I don't know, grapes or something but this is a vine. This doesn't really work. And what's this? This is sort of like 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 cat tails 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 and these are all trees. So I mean it's nice that there are trees but again not what we're going for. Okay anything else in here? Well we have, we looked at nature right? Yeah so that's where we came from. There's open game art assets but if we look at it it's basically just a palm tree. So 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 create stuff. We can look at 3D models and we can see if there's anything sort of like long and stalky. There's nature. Nature crops. Ultimate nature pack. What does that look like? Wow that is incredibly low-poly and not good. How about nature crops? Well, there's this. What does that look like? Oh yeah that's very low-poly. 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. It's basically just cacti. There's edited whatever that is. It's another cactus. Scopia. 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 stalky 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 sketchfab. That would also be too smart. It's I'm going to take a frame old better it's this thing that thing. Basic game ready plant. That's what it was. Okay so now on sketchfab 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 Nios 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 leaves but the leaves disappear when you look at them from the bottom and that's because leaves generally use dual sided materials. So the way to fix this is like this what you do is you grab your you grab your dev tooltip okay 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 ding ding 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 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 cut out 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 is there anything else that we can look at smoothness I mean it all looks the same so there's an alpha cut off of 0.5 and there really isn't anything else so I think this is all that we that we get 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 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 what was it it was basic game ready plant 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 grabbable on here the grabbable is at the top which is just fine there's this tag that says object root that tells 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 that requires attribution for example creative commons attribution you go to where is it is it is it metadata license and then in license you put the credit string so it requires credit and you can export it and let's go to the credits okay so you see 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 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 big I guess so let's see let me grab an inspector again so let's see if I take the mesh and I change what's up here oh okay so here's another issue which is that the scale of the top object is not one which I don't really like so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the mesh which is 111 and I'm just going to copy what is it 0.00818 sure 0.00819 so I'm just going to go 0.00819 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 one so now for my particular object what I want to do is I want to change the scale 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 wispy I think I kind of like that so you can see that there are actually different different sizes here 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 so that the child has basically a null transform so in other words zero position, zero rotation and scale of one that's not really what I wanted what I wanted was for sort of the basic plant to have 0.5 1 and 0.5 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 I don't know 0.8 so that just makes a smaller plant but in the same proportions so that's what I was talking about when I said the scale to be applied to the child so this looks nice I can also maybe make it 1.2 oops 1.2 so that makes a kind of a bigger one so maybe with the bigger one I also maybe want to drop the scale to like I don't know 0.8 you know just to make it look I don't know roughly maybe make it look a little thinner and straggler I don't know I mean this is fine so the point is that I want to make a bunch of these 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 so now when I save it to my inventory I'll have a v0 and a v1 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 flax so now I can go into flax and copy the plant and now I can move this to a different location so why can't I move this to a different location I'm oops that's okay the ground is grabbable that's not good undo grab objects let's go to the ground and remove the grabbable so 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 up to here and over here okay maybe I'll rotate it a little bit so give it a little bit of rotation maybe a little more okay so it doesn't look so regular same thing with this plant maybe I'll do 45 here okay so this is looking actually pretty nice let's create another small plant like that one over there so I'm going to copy this and give us a teeny little .5 plant where is it? it's over there it's so cute 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 .7 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 and use fly to take a look at how my flax plant is looking it's looking pretty good I'm liking it now one of the things that I can't show you is the effect of the game the minigame when it's actually running 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 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 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 basically take the alpha from 0 to 1 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 so here's the alpha now if I bring it down to 0 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 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 so this isn't really a great shader 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 going to 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 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 front plant let me replace its material with this 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 there is some place else that I can do 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 so none of these are really doing anything so I thought that what I could do somehow is 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 um change the alpha up and down and it fades in and out so that's basically that so that's how to do it 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 thing but that's okay there are only a few of these okay 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 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? alright 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 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 all this work was just 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 and if I could 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 okay well it's just a shell that was fun trees, vegetation pack again those are just trees the nature assets I think we're all low poly so we don't find anything here and we're not going to find anything I believe in any of these other things nope 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 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 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 chapter and look at the texture okay yeah so this is basically 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 this is the material again it's not suitable because we actually wanted to 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 tune get this all out of the way great and I'm just going to copy the numbers over so so there's my material I'm going to close this out close this out apply the material and it's slightly lighter but now I can simply modify it to kind of the the brighter sort of lavenderish color kind of like that I'll like that 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 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 plants all of my hard work is gone okay and now I'm just left with this main plant so I can take this and stick it under flax no stick it under the plant okay so 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 maybe a little down yeah that looks pretty good oh that's unfortunate look at that from the underneath 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 yeah there it is so what you do is you grab the texture you move it away and then you press the trigger and that gives you this thing so let me do that again just like that and there is a I think there is a selection to make it double-sided somewhere or maybe not I'm pretty sure there was make square flip 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 so because it's the mesh that's the problem so if I go into where is 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 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 a key to doing that how did I learn all this I asked on the discord and eventually I got some answers sometimes some people come in to help me with things when I ask or when they offer and that's how I learned the tune material thing so okay so now that I have this basic game ready plant I'm just going to call it stock 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 okay how about here great okay so 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 give it a little rotation make another copy and this time we are going to 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, 0.5, 0.5 and where should this one go how about we put it right over there and we'll give it another twist say 10 degrees we'll take the same size plant and say put it out there and give it a twist of 5 degrees let's give it 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 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 flax stock let's see how many that is 7 let's put one over there and maybe make it like 0.9 by 0.9 by 0.9 and twist it by minus 20 and one more so that would be a total okay let's stick this say over there let's make it a bit small so 0.6, 0.6, 0.6 and say 25 degrees okay so now if I go into the flax stock so we have two materials one on the stock itself and one on the one on the flower and we would have to change the alphas on both of those materials simultaneously at the same rate from 0 to 1 but that's what we will do with the logics for now what I just wanted to do was make the static plants with no game logic so this is looking pretty good I'll look at it from all angles I'm kind of liking that there is kind of a bare patch over here you know what I don't really care all that much again I'm just sort of putting the fundamentals down and you can fill in your own little flax patch okay so that's the flax the next thing that we need to do is look at the weed now the weed 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 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 I don't really care about the emissive color it's very low anyway okay so I'm going to 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 if I put that on the metallic gloss map let's see what happens not a whole lot so I can actually just clear that because that really didn't have much of an effect at all 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 yeah I'm just going to clear that yeah it didn't it didn't really seem to have an effect there is emission map matte cap I have no idea what that is how about I just play with it and see what happens wow that wasn't very good at all there's the occlusion map 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 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 come out door there's the license on it there's stem zero now I want to make it look weedy so if I take this deselect it take it and stick it over here 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 ooh look at that oops that is actually quite brown I'm in fly mode let me get out of fly mode okay now I'm on the ground so that's actually quite brown which is nice 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 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 let me apply the point zero zero zero blah blah blah point zero zero zero 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 grabbable 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 grabbable to it in fact I should probably take the grabbable off of these flax plants too if if I had one yeah I will do that later so now I remove the grabbable I should mark it with the object root just for good practice so I think that's transform tagging no it's just transform object root so that marks this is the object root so there's my weed 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 let me take the weed and stick it in 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 I can even make it a different size like say 0.8 0.8 maybe 1.8 so it's slightly smaller I can duplicate the weed and maybe which one is the weed that I duplicated okay let me deselect everything okay so there's a weed ah there's another weed 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 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 tubby okay so those are my weeds and again the idea is that all the weeds would their alpha would go from 0 to 1 simultaneously now in the game you will be able to grab one of these weeds so of course it's gonna have to have a grabable 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 all go away and 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 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 I mean this looks pretty good so maybe I'll just go with it the problem is that it's not really 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 stalk is roughly straight up and down and I think it's not quite okay I think that's okay so now we deselect it and grab it so it would 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 I'm going to keep the grabbable because I know I'm going to need grabbable on it at this 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 the alphas get moved yeah so the material on this is already a tune 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 so that is 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