Rocks!

 My work on the game project has been rather slow the past couple weeks. Recently, I've acquired a 3D printer of my own, I have previous experience 3D printing and have been spending a lot of time configuring it. After printing some bits and pieces I created in Maya, I came to the realise teaching myself a CAD package would help drastically with some of the more measurement sensitive things I'd like to print. As such, my time has been somewhat split between the game and AutoCAD, but I'm beginning to get back on track with the game environment.

So, onto my most recent foray into the environment creation. I need rocks, only a few as of right now, as building blocks are required to start giving the landscape some direction. I previously created a rock for another project and will be editing that one in due time, as of right now I'm starting from scratch for more variation.

The first step was the high poly rock, taking a simple cube from Maya with a few subdivisions and importing it to Mudbox as a base mesh. Using mostly the scrape tool with a mask, I slowly moulded the rock I envisioned. My previous rock had been narrow and tall, this instance was to be the opposite, like a large boulder that would fill up the cliff sides or create rocky structures. The final high poly mesh was around 2,000,000 polys. I exported this to be used in 3dCoat.

Now that I had a chunky piece of rock, using the import function in 3dCoat, I began to combine multiple versions of the same rock with varying scales. I was careful not to repeat patterns, avoiding similarities when put in engine. The reason for using 3dCoat is simple, its real-time movement of high-poly meshes is incredibly useful as well as seamlessly merging multiple meshes, its quick at what it does too. After a quick touch-up the final high-poly mesh was ready, the next step was to decimate it low enough for the low-poly that will be seen in-engine. 

Using MeshLab's fantastic decimation filter, my rock is down to 800 tris, enough detail for the silhouette and not to much for the engine. Next I used this in conjunction with the high-poly version inside of Mudbox and xNormal to create the various maps needed.

My first go at texturing the rock was using Quixel, this is the same process used for my last rock. It turned out pretty well, though there is room for improvement. I didn't spend much time on this stage, I wanted to get the rock in-engine to play around with the form of it more than the texture fidelity.

As I stated, the texture process was very similar to that of the previous rock, as seen in this comparison they look like they belong in the same scene. Using both variants I decided to try creating a cave. The shapes complemented well and I was able to create a very rudimentary cave, it would need a lot more to look convincing, but for now at get my idea across and visualised. I want to take these rocks a bit further before I'm finished with them though, improving the textures is my next course of action. 

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.

Shaders and Early Textures

I've experimenting a lot with Shader Forge recently. I worked through a few tutorials online to get myself more familiarised with it. Learning this Unity plugin is key to my success with this environment, its an incredibly powerful tool and will help to seamlessly blend the world together. But first, I went back to basics. Unfortunately, during my previous project I didn't get much assistance from my lecturers with the usages of Shader Forge, so by following online tutorials I quickly got the hang of it. Some of these shaders may not seem particularly associated with environment, they can easily be edited to suit any needs. I should also note that many of the textures are taken from CGTextures, its a great site for placeholder texture maps whilst I work on my own.

Using gradients you can create some wacky shaders by manipulating the UVs. It creates some fascinating animated objects. By inputting a noise texture in the form of clouds from Photoshop, I was able to make a shader that could "dissolve" a texture, adding a colour ramp gave the illusion of fire, though I have yet to figure out how to animate this.

 

Continuing my experimenting I create a shader that would use heightmap generated from the texture to place an animated glow between the gaps in stone bricks for example.

For what I wanted to do, I needed a more accurate heightmap. I plan on using vertex painting to blend two textures together, for example grass growing up and between stone brick. I created a couple variants, one simply used vertex painting to dictate how far the grass will grow between the bricks, and another which combined the vertex painted grass with an amount of noise generated grass. The latter would be used for structures I want to appear old, as if grass has began growing over it, this variant I prefer at this moment. The former I've had more trouble with, I may need to revise it once again to get the desired effect correctly. 

My final topic of this post is about some initial texture work. I wanted a way of quickly texturing many object quickly and with minimal texture maps. Using ZBrush I created the brick diffuse and normal map seen on the stone fence above. I hope to reuse this on many brick structures. The next bit of texture work was to create a single diffuse and normal map for a magnitude of unique objects, a put together a quick example below. From here I will finish the two maps and continue experimenting with workflows. Learning the texturing process for large, diverse environments is much more strenuous than I'd thought, there seems to be little to nothing online. Most of my information has be taken from studying the games I play, Dark Souls 3 in particular has influenced me a lot as of late.

Speed Tree and Foliage

Speed Tree is another program I'm new to, recommended to me by a friend, it aims to speed up the process of making anything foliage related; from ferns to trees. During my first session using it I create a few things to start filling up my landscape.

Firstly, using some of the provided textures I created a basic tree and bush, added colliders, wind animations, etc. Once I had a grasp of the interface, the software was very easy to understand and gave a great depth of creative freedom.

The grass shown in the images above was created previously. Using Maya, I made and arranged some blades of grass and applied a basic colour ramp texture. I projected the grass onto a flat plane and exported it to use in Photoshop. After editing the colour and creating the alpha channel, I dilated the image a few times before importing it into Unity for use.

I went back into Speed Tree to quickly create a new bush using some different textures I put together using similar techniques as used making the grass, this broke up the green in the scene and added some much needed diversity.

3rd Year Game - Landscape Mk.1

For the third year project my group and myself will be creating a co-op fantasy role-playing game. Though seemingly ambitious, it will be fairly small in comparison to similar games in the genre. As a group of six, we would be pressed for time to create a large scale open world, full of everything you would expect of a modern day RPG.

With that said, my role in the group is environment artist. I am one of two who will be constructing the world space. My more specific role is to create the open world landscape the players will be adventuring in. So my first step is to make the landmass.

This is something I've never tried before, previously I would just model the landscape in either Maya or Unity's own terrain editor. This is fine for small areas, but we needed much bigger world spaces. I decided to learn to use World Machine, as it would give me the creative freedom to sculpt a believable landscape as well as speeding up the whole workflow I was previously using.

To start with I needed a heightmap to get started in World Machine, something that would give a good base to build upon. Using Mudbox, I quickly sculpted the basics of the landscape I'd envisioned. Making sure to keep the brush parameters within the y-axis, I used a combination of the scrape brush and a rocky mask to create the cliffs and hillsides.

With the heightmap exported straight from Mudbox I swiftly moved into World Machine to start refining the natural look of the land. The lower areas around the cliffs was to become the ocean, as such I wanted to create a lot of erosion along the coastline. I added more subtle erosion and terracing around the cliffs and hillsides to show the natural shifting of sediment. To finish the scenery, I used an advanced perlin to randomise the terrain somewhat, making it appear less uniform.

Happy with the overall landscaping, I used a coastal overlay macro to add colour and depth to the terrain, this macro is also what I'll be using to export the various maps I'll need to create the terrain's colour map.

There were lot of maps I needed, these included masks for various textures, flow maps, light map, ambient occlusion, etc. I needed the final heightmap also, the net step is to go back into Mudbox to refine and add more detail to the rock faces.

All the extra maps I exported in World Machine were compiled into the same Photoshop image to create the colour map for the terrain. Using the masks and flow maps, I edited the hue and saturation of each element. The initial map was very lacklustre, it had little definition of the rock faces, the ambient occlusion and light map were too bland, the map just wasn't good enough.

I imported the heightmap, exported earlier from World Machine, back into Mudbox for the final touches. After refining the cliffs and rock faces, I used Mudbox map exporter to create better a ambient occlusion map, as well as a cavity map, normal map and highlights map, Mudbox is a great tool for these maps, I've found the definition on its exports much better than other software. This was the result after applying and playing with the new maps.

Here the colour map is applied to the mesh in Mudbox, I continued to sculpt some more detail into the landscape before exporting the final height map and normal map.

With both the height, normal and colour maps completed, I needed to create the splat map. The splat map uses ARGB to dictate where the various textures maps will go and how they blend.  Using the previously exported masks and Photoshop, I placed each mask in a different RGB channel. Having only three textures, I left the alpha channel blank.

Unity seems to have trouble with heightmaps, it took many attempts before the terrain imported correctly. It recognises the .raw file type, and after using Photoshop to export the height map as the correct file extension, the data was seemingly to be corrupt. Unity didn't seem to recognise the .raw16 extension that I was using to get a 16bit height map as opposed to an 8bit one. It neither recognised .pgm or .tif either, both of which were recommended online. In the end I had to settle with importing an 8bit height map.

Using a Unity plugin called "ATS Color Map Ultra", I placed each of the various maps in the correct slots, then edited the values until I was satisfied with the results. At this stage I'm using placeholder textures I found on CGTextures.com, I'll later create my own.

Using Unity's own water shader, I added a placeholder ocean. Lastly I messed with the lighting, fog and shadows to finalise the look. These parameters are likely to change though, as I populate the landscape with foliage and structures.

Completed Scene

With the final touches complete the scene was finished. I added sound affects for the tank, wind and rustling trees. The smoke billowing out of the vents was created using Unity's particle system, and I also added some lighting for the headlight and rear ligthts.

When the scene is loaded it plays a cut-scene of the camera orbiting the tank then stopping as it gets to the camp, after which, allowing the player to move around the scene.

I would have liked to add more to the scene, a ravaged city-scape  in the background and other vehicle wrecks would have given more of a background to the tank and overall project. Also I would have make the tank look more post-apocalyptic by adding a lot more metal panelling, but I should have decided that earlier in the project so I could model it in that way.

Finishing Touches

This is the final camp in the scene, the campfire, like the rock, was originally made for another project, as it fit with the subject it is now present in this scene also.

As previously stated with the rock, I used it to create formations by placing them against each other and around the ground. By placing them this way it doesn't look like the same rock and avoids a repeating formation.

Each sign is simply a sprite with a different material. It made it much easier for placement and avoid me having to create separate models for each sign.

After attempting to use Maya's nCloth to animate the tent, I simply used Unity's in-engine cloth. After setting some anchor points it reacts to the windzone in scene effectively.