Regional vegetation: three production decisions

Checked 15 September 2026. This is a bounded asset handoff for M3/M4, not completed vegetation art or an AAA acceptance. No Unity or player was started; nothing was imported into Assets. Source downloads are outside Unity under Tools/Downloads/RegionalVegetation.

1. Tuscany: author the cypress; keep the verified olive as a secondary source

Decision: make an original Italian-cypress family in the already installed Blender, using existing licensed bark/branch resources, rather than relabeling the existing fir. A suitable free olive does exist: Tomasz Czerniak's Olive Tree, listed Free, 68.6 MiB and 1,245,078 polygons. Its license is Royalty Free, not CC0; the publisher permits commercial higher-level derivative works but restricts resale as an asset/model pack. Publisher license.

The olive was not downloaded: this pass avoids adding a new Blender service integration and has enough available materials to start the cypress. It remains a precise secondary acquisition candidate, not a claimed local file. Its polygon count is the publisher's count, not measured runtime triangles.

Original cypress specification: three irregular narrow column silhouettes, 9/13/17 m tall, 1.1–2.0 m crown width; tapered branching visible through small gaps; offset crown clusters rather than solid cones. Build scale-like twig geometry for close foliage. The existing Tools/Downloads/Alpine/fir_tree_01/textures/fir_tree_01_bark_diff_1k.png and matching normal/roughness may supply bark detail; fir_tree_01_twig_* is usable for internal/remote twig cards only. Do not present visible fir needles as accurate cypress foliage. Source licensing/hashes already exist in the fir source-manifest.json.

Own production targets: LOD0 8–12k triangles, LOD1 3k, LOD2 700 plus authored distant impostor. A supplementary olive fallback can use a newly modeled low gnarled trunk and sparse umbrella crown with original narrow paired leaf geometry. Existing tree_small_02 leaf atlases are a licensed prototyping resource, not proof of olive species accuracy; visible hero leaves need an original matching shape/atlas before acceptance.

2. Coast / Nile: downloaded palm atlas and geometry, with separate date-palm silhouette

Decision: use Yughues / Nobiax — Free palm treeZ v3 as a readily editable coastal source and frond atlas. Its original upload and included readme.txt both state CC0 1.0. The downloaded archive is 19,714,152 bytes; it contains five OBJ/FBX variants and four 2048×2048 maps. Actual OBJ parsing measured 940 triangles for each single palm, 1,880 for each double and 2,820 for the triple. Diffuse has alpha; normal, specular and translucency are separate.

Local files: palm_treez_v3/PACK_V3.7z, palm_treez_v3/extracted/palm_straight.obj, palm_bend.obj, palm_dual.obj, palm_dual_bend.obj, palm_trio.obj, and diffuse.tga, normal.tga, specular.tga, translucency.tga. Full measured inventory: Tools/Downloads/RegionalVegetation/palm-inventory.json.

The supplied preview was inspected. It has useful curved fronds and trunk shapes but dated, dark baked shading. It is a source, not approved AAA art. Retain the source unchanged, rebuild HDRP foliage materials and verify alpha edges/normal orientation. Do not mechanically treat old specular as a metallic map. Close hero palms need improved trunk silhouette and less conspicuous planar leaves; the supplied mesh is already inexpensive enough for a middle LOD.

For the Nile chapter, author a different date-palm: a thicker upright trunk with diamond-shaped old leaf bases, a denser radial crown and more upright fronds. Reuse the CC0 frond material/UV sections on newly built curved frond meshes. Proposed LOD budgets: 5–8k / 2k / 600 triangles. Do not scatter the bent coastal palm unchanged throughout the Nile valley. These budgets and the new date-palm geometry are production work still to perform.

3. Jungle: downloaded scanned tree parts, plus an original tall canopy tree

Decision: adapt Poly Haven Island Tree 01 for lower canopy, roots and tropical coastal vegetation; author a taller buttressed trunk/canopy variant for jungle scale. The publisher identifies it as a coastal tree; no specific tropical species is established. Rob Tuytel supplied scanning/processing, Rico Cilliers cleanup/processing; CC0 asset license.

The original 1k Blend plus all ten listed dependencies are downloaded, 79,948,931 bytes total. Publisher API metadata lists 3,729,692 source triangles and geometry nodes/LODs. All eleven files match the publisher's advertised size and MD5. The Blend file alone is 58,077,856 bytes. This is an editable source, not a mesh to instance unchanged in Unity.

Local entry point: island_tree_01/island_tree_01_1k.blend; relative textures/ dependencies are preserved. Use scanned trunk/root geometry, bake branch clusters into alpha-cut cards, then export explicit static LODs. Proposed budgets: 12–18k / 5k / 1.2k triangles, with only a few large nearby trees at LOD0. The original tall jungle variant should have 18–25 m height, irregular buttress roots, multiple canopy strata and gaps; avoid scaling one low coastal tree vertically. Actual Blender render and game-camera acceptance are still required.

Reproducible local handoff

All paths above are relative to C:/Unity Projects/MotoRacer - Rampage/Tools/Downloads/RegionalVegetation, unless explicitly prefixed otherwise. New downloaded source payload totals 99,663,083 bytes. No fir or Tree Small 02 download was repeated.

Docs/regional-vegetation-sources.json records the exact source URLs, byte counts, publisher MD5 where available, SHA-256 and UTC acquisition time. The ignored download directory also contains fetch_candidates.py, inventory_palm.py, the two original API JSON files and the measured palm inventory. No Blender addon or downloaded script was executed.

Key SHA-256 checks:

Next owner action is production from these named sources: mesh/material adaptation, three LODs, bounds, alpha-overdraw assessment and actual chapter-camera review. Download completeness and clear licenses do not establish the required visual quality or target-GPU performance.