Stone Structures Tile Set

After the success of the small beacon structure from the previous post, I decided to begin creating a stone structure tile set. Each piece will be able to snap to each other in a plethora of configurations to quickly craft thing like temples, bridges and ruins, to populate the game world. Using very basic textures, I quickly made some shapes that looked somewhat fantasy, though I had a lot of influence from ancient Inca and Mayan structures. The key to making a tile set like this is to keep every piece within certain measurements, using the snap-to-grid mode, I kept everything within twelve units.

As well as the larger pieces, I've began to make smaller 'dividers'. These will snap over top of texture seams that result when placing the larger walls together. I've kept the polycount fairly low for most objects, though I went back to the stairs to add more features.

Using the texture in Maya, I lined up edge-loops with the bricks shown. This allowed me to emphasise individual bricks. The normal map alone didn't give enough definition, and using this method is easy and gives great results. I will do the same with the floor tiles in the future.

Now that each piece was modelled I moved it all into engine to see how it looked. Using my previously created splatting shader, I applied the correct maps to every object and snap them together in some form. Personally, I am pleased with the result. A structure made from the objects almost looks seamless once the dividers are placed. Unfortunately the texture resolution is rather low, as it was a test I simply used 1024x1024 textures, I'm planning to bump this up to 2048x2048.

These are the only components I made during this session, and I'll continue adding to it, as well as improving the textures. Though, I must be careful not to used too many texture sheets. Moving onto 2k will allow me to add extra features to existing texture maps, allowing for a more varied tile set.

Finally, I experimented with adding destruction to the model. I anchored the three sides of the stone fence piece and broke it apart. It looks quite convincing, and with a few improvements to the mesh, it will work rather well.