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My Birch Winter Forest - A Contemplation Build

Decorative image of a low poly winter scene of birch and pine trees in a village park

I've had times in my life when I've been one of those Holiday-of-the-Month-style teachers. 😀📅 January is, in my determination, the month of contemplation and of quietness. Nature forces you to slow down and sit. Perhaps take the time to write a haiku.

So coming through December into January, I knew this next build with Blender, hosted in Hubs, would be themed as quiet space in winter forest. It would be a nice place to sit and think, a place to visit regardless of the actual weather.

Inspiration

For years, I've had an image like this tucked into my mind: chickadees and birch trees. Tonal and cool; black, white, and gray. Chickadees stay around here all winter. They pop and hop around on the coldest day and are early to emerge after the biggest snowstorm. They just make me happy like daisies do for Kathleen Kelly . 😀 

Decorative image of upclose birch trees with chickadees on the branches. Tones are grays.
Chickadees and birch trees

Unlike the earlier months of winter when brown dominates the landscape, by January, we are usually blanketed in snow. The winter solstice has turned the tide of darkness back and at least during daylight hours, everything is in white/gray light.

Since I knew I wanted birch trees, I did a little gathering of birch tree photos that I would use (disregarding the AI images). 

Collage of images birch forests and a great horned owl
More inspiration images

Color Palette

 This inspiration photo is where I pulled almost all of my colors from.  

Inspiration image of a snow covered birch fores with small pine trees and a path


From this photo, I pulled out the browns, greens, and whites. I also made small pines and stick-like baby trees. I also thought about making the ground a little lumpy.
 

In this build one of my first new revelations was that all of the colors would look like they go together if I pull them from one source. 

Said another way, if something looked good in a photo (tonal and pleasing to the eye) then the same color combinations might go together well in VR.

Of course, lighting is a different problem altogether. In this photo, it was sunny and wasn't sure yet what my sky would be. I ended up making a blue to white sky gradient that I never used!

UV Texture Atlas

Even though I have thought about and attempted a texture atlas before, I have never successfully made and used one for a full build. I was never trained until I watched this video, How to Colorize Low Poly Fast for Games in Blender 4.3 (49:16) YouTube tutorial by Imphenzia.  I like how he prompted to work with the X and Y scale on the UV texture. I did that a LOT and ended up with cool birch trees.

Because I'm proud of it, here is the final atlas, made entirely in Blender 5.0 (most of the scene was built with Blender 4.0.2)

Texture atlas square of shades of black, white, brown, and blue.
All of these colors came from the photo directly above.


I've learned how to make those voronoi textures on the left side, one is shades of black, brown, and white, and the other is just shades of black and white.

Capture of Blender, Shading tab, how to create my voronoi texture
Work in progress, showing the shading tab for the black, brown and white voronoi texture

Distribute Objects on a Plane...or not


I wanted to return to Ryan King's Distribute Objects on a Plane (16:07) YouTube tutorial and I did create my winter birch forest scene twice using geometry nodes. 

I had a scene in mind of a birch tree-filled mountain valley with a little stream. 

I started with something that was probably 400 meters square and then was filling that space densely with trees. 

Capture from Blender of early distribute objects on plane results with birch trees and rocks


Work in progress. Birch trees and rocks using geometry nodes. This is taken from inside Blender and I've not yet applied the modifier.

 

Capture from Blender of a park bench on a hillside with trees.
More work in progress. Bench, hills, and slightly less trees.
 
Capture from Hubs scene with ghostly dark trees and rocks
First attempt in Hubs. No lighting yet and geometry nodes modifier is not applied. D'oh!

I foolishly tried the Blender Real Snow extension just to see how my trees might look with some snow on the few branches- and my computer never stopped calculating. I had to force crash Blender. 😦🔨💻😖


After "applying" the geometry node modifier, the truth came rushing at me. I was facing 200,000 triangles for what I thought was a good looking scene. I attempted some heartbreaking deletions to get down to ~85,000 triangles. All this time, I was hearing the advice "It's always hard to do nature scenes because they are actually complex!"  Yup. I'd say 'live and learn' but I know I'll keep attempting these nature scenes.

It didn't take long before I realized I had to give up this elaborate idea and do a much smaller scene. In addition to the MANY trees, the "lumpy" ground was costing too many polygons and I was designing a place to 'go here and see this' and then 'go there and see that' on a mountain side. 

I realized I had missed my original design idea: a place to stop and contemplate.  

I started over again with a ~40 meters square, no geometry nodes. I deliberately placed every tree.

Re-use Assets I've Already Built

I was really pleased with how well the birch trees turned out. I ended up making one new birch tree but re-used the birch trees from my Pumpkin Patch build of Halloween 2024.

Capture from my Pumpkin Patch scene with birch trees to the middle right.
The birch trees in my Pumpkin Patch build were re-used and re-textured in my Birch Winter Forest build.



Example birch trees transparent image
To help save even more  polygons, I made transparent pngs of my birch trees in Blender and placed some of those 'images as planes' on the edge of the scene. Unless you flew around them, you would not know they were flat planes.

Snowflakes are 6-sided

I spent 1.5 days making snowflakes. I also tested them in Spoke but made some final tweaks once I tested the scene in Hubs. I thought of having more than one particle emitter in different parts of the scene, but again, decided to keep it simple with only one covering most of the whole scene.

Collage of different 6-sided snowflake designs made in Blender

Layered Sound

For the first time, I didn't just select a sound file and have it loop. I found a background, Forest Ouareau and a chickadee sound file that I liked and I layered them together. The result worked wonderfully!

Animation

The chickadee file had 5 chirping events, so I made a narrative of those sounds:

1. Chickadee A is very friendly. It will spot you as a visitor and fly down to the bench.
2. Chickadee A will fly to some (imaginary) seed on the ground and call out to Chickadee B.
3. Chickadee B is more shy and will only respond from a nearby tree but will not fly down.
4. Chickadee A will fly back to his original tree branch.

The loop restarts after ~119 seconds.


Chickadee A

 

Chickadee B
 



I also added an owl that opens her eyes halfway, but she's too sleepy and drifts back into her daytime nap.


Capture from Hubs Birch Winter Forest with an owl in a far away treetop
Can you see her? Far back in the tallest pine

Capture of Hubs scene. Owl close up with eyes halfway open
She sees you!

Feedback


I received this feedback on the scene:

  • Snow on the ground needs to be a little whiter
  • Snowflakes need to be a lot whiter
  • Change alpha settings on stream water to see if transparency will work
  • Combine objects using the same material, not just the same object mesh
  • Add back in some fog


I made those improvements.


This scene is open for visiting upon request. See my About Me page.

Capture of Hubs Birch Winter Forest scene. A path winds through a snowy area with birch and pine trees. A bench welcomes visitors.

 

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