Back in the Hedgerows I go

Ah those hedges again, they'd been so well behaved and out the way I was beginning to forget about them but time to pay them a visit again but for something more interesting this time at least.

Well first there were some changes to make. Since the gardens are pretty much finalised now it's easier to have the hedge walls as a solid mesh rather than all the separate modular pieces so a quick export from Unreal as a reference so the scaling would be right and a few tweaks in 3DS max, followed by the traditional needless crash for a menial task again the first job is quickly done. Then it was onto something more interesting.

Hedge shapes! These were actually a lot of fun to make and the shapes were based off the historical gardens from the British library pictures.

This was mainly all spline work, some of the more swirling patterns were extruded along a spline but with the slightly blocker shapes like the middle on I'd made flattened silhouettes of the shapes from the books and drew around them with a spline and extruded from it instead. While this meant an accurate shape it left a fair bit to do by hand to bring down the try count and clean up the topology.

Once all that was done I then just started playing with the symmetry modifier to see what interesting shapes I could get out of three basic starting pieces.

Mark also added a fence piece running along the outside which helps further separate the cared for gardens from the forest left to it's own devices.