Video Game Foliage

There is probably some artist whose life's work is being The Tree Guy. Art direction called for a Japanese maple to be in the background of that shot and, by God, TTG made it so. Can't render scenes in a forest? Call in TTG -- he can take a clipper to the topiary and knock off 80% of the polys off a stockart tree without taking away 1% of it's tree-ness. When the companies which make automated tree-production software (n.b. this is A Thing [+] and it costs several thousand dollars a license IIRC) needed recommended parameters for aesthetically pleasing trees, who do they call? TTG, that's right. Give him 30 minutes and a high-end PC to do simulated annealing and he'll come up with a new species of tree, unknown to nature, which nonetheless would fool botanists because it looks like it should exist, somewhere, maybe in wet regions of Laos.

I really feel for video game artists. In some ways, they're like the medieval painters of our age -- the ones who would paint gorgeous frescoes in parts of cathedrals which were planned to be occluded in further construction, because if that part of the wall was unpainted God would see it. I walked into a room in a Final Fantasy game once, blew through it in 7 seconds, then went back and thought "Wait, somebody -- heck, probably a team of someones -- spent most of a year of their life getting this room ready for those seven seconds."

It's inspiring, in a way, and also makes me triply glad that I am not in the game industry.

[+] Edit: Representative example: http://www.speedtree.com/

Also linked in the blog: http://videogametumbleweeds.tumblr.com/

Excellent blog topic :). I really enjoyed the trees and day/night simulation in A Valley Without Wind.