[UNITY]Mobile Basketball, Game Development Thread

waldo

Hi guys,
I'm working on a street basketball environment based in a city and need some tips and feedback. I have gotten the basic look that I want in there but would appreciate some help on how to enhance it.

Since this is going on mobile I'm quite limited when it comes to shaders but i have some vertex gloss, cubemap reflections, simple vegetation shaders etc and baked lighting to work with. I also got a great script for decals working to break up tiling.

I will bake some houses etc into the skybox and also fix the black line in the last screen. I might also take another swing at the tree.





Now please help me push this further!

waldo

Messed around with lights a bit..

waldo

I retextured the brick house since it was all blurry and unclear. I'm gonna go for a more handpainted/realistic look. Larger bricks to avoid the blurriness.

Got the tip by a friend to look at Dishonored and how they textured environment. So I will retexture everything in the same feel as this house.


Old to the right and new to the left

Shad0w_Walker

I like it! Keep up the good work

waldo

I have been reworking the textures today, a few left but the buildings and a few props are working a lot better now.

Please feel free to rip me a new one if you see something that you think sucks :P

The skybox is really mockup so I will have to fix that..

waldo

Looking at the pictures I should probably make a tile with only bricks and plaster to break up the houses, there is a lot of windows. Maybe make some simple antennas, pipes, ventilation boxes on the roofes etc to break it up a bit.

Any ideas on how to improve the scene?

VictorSantos

First of all, awesome work! It's looking great so far.

About your idea, I'm thinking something like this should make it, maybe there's too many references (sorry!):



Or maybe even flags:

waldo

Thanks, great idea! I will try to incorporate some kind of sign to get a more landmark kind of feel. Thanks for the tip, will try to sketch something tomorrow that might work. Maybe a brewery brand or something

futurepoly

I think this is looking cool so far. I do think the scale is kind of off on the hoop however. The first shot you have looks like the hoop has been lowered quite a bit. Even if the hoop needs to stay that exact size maybe changing the pole type to something like this would make it seem more realistic.

Broadway

This looks really awesome. Good work!

The only thing that really jumps out at me is that some of the leaves on your trees look like they're floating and not connected to the tree. Without seeing your textures I'm not sure, but it looks like maybe the leaf clumps in your texture are a little on the sparse side.

Also it might help to have some flat alpha-cutouts for more complex small branches coming off of the main tree limbs, sort of like they did in Diablo 3:

http://diablootr.mymiddleearth.com/files/2012/06/gameplay_d3_01.jpg

I don't know how much of this you could get away with since you're making this for mobile devices, though.

Good stuff dude, it already looks badass!

Z3D

Oh yeah man,really nice work and yes you have to redo the leaves, the brick wall it's very nice, maybe if you increase the normal( if it's used)in the paviment , I feel the sky a little dark.

I really love to see some wires, textures,images effects.. you know everything else , congrats waldo !

waldo

futurepoly: I didn't realize that hoops were that far up, even more impressed with basketball players right now. I fixed that, from what I could see there was about two dudes up to the ring of the hoop so now I have the same height at least. Thanks!

Broadway: The trees are a real pain in the a** on mobile. But yes, I will try to redo the trees with more branch like planes while keeping the fill rate down. I hate those damn trees :P.

Generally you would want to use a cut out shader for trees but on mobile this eats all your frame rate right away. So you have to go for alpha blend. This leaves you with either a lot of drawcalls and popping (since every plane would have to be their own and sorted as such) or merging the whole bunch of planes together as one and have them sort wrong (it will be sorted after the vertex list, so leaves in the back might end up in the front).

Also on older devices like the iPad 1 and 3GS you don't want to much fillrate as this also eats performance (fill rate is when the device have to draw on the same pixel over and over again, as when you put three transparent planes in a row).

But yeah, the Diablo 3 style would probably look a lot better, will try to shoot for like that working.


Z3D: I don't have any normals to play with since mobiles are generally bad with pixel shaders. It can be used on specific things like characters but not like consoles when you can have it on almost everything. I'll try to put a little more geometry on the pavement and work a little more on the texture because I agree, it looks terribly flat.

Here are wires and textures of the houses and props, I haven't retextured the props yet to the new more handpainted style but I'll do that today.







As far as image effect and shaders, since mobiles suck at per pixel lighting and effects what I have are particles, some cheap lens effect and lightmaps with diffuse shaders. I have a vertex gloss shader that I use on the props and a reflective shader that I use on the windows and hoop glass.


Thanks for all the feedback guys and sorry about all the techical mumbo jumbo!

Z3D

aaaah many thanks, very good assets ,now I see your diffuse are so much greater , you don't need to care about the normal map. Keep going, I just subscribe to watch this:)

waldo

I have retextured the props now and will start working on a sign and some other stuff. Have trouble getting the light right but I will work more on that later.

The trees still look like crap but I will get to them later. I also have a black edge on the dirt piles that is because of the AO bake. Don't how how I will fix that but I'll get there.

Also the concrete outside of the court is just mockup for now, will make a texture and fit in some meshes for that.

Any more ideas?

waldo

So I got stuck redesigning the houses, I couldn't take all those windows any more so I started trying to break it up a little more. Don't know about those pipes yet, it might look cool but maybe it's a little to sci-fi or whatever.

What do you think about the pipes, does it work or just look funky? I'm not shooting for realism here but stylized realism.




Ignore the hideous houses and concrete floors in the background :P

cupsster

That pipe! Too big for me. Add escape stair instead. Also look for electrical wires if you need interesting perspective changes.

waldo

Made the pipes smaller and change around them a little. Don't want to remove them since I kinda like how they look and the shapes they add.



Will post more progress tomorrow

cptSwing

Yeah, don't know about those pipes man. A little jarring. Centralised heating-pipes will be quite large and visible, but they stick to the ground or run along the road above street level, they wouldn't snake up the houses though.. Other than that I like your scene, nice textures as well!

waldo

I got inspired by this screen from dishonored

The Mad Artist

Awesome textures so far, really liking how this is coming together. The basket height looks right, regulation rims are 10 ft high, maybe it's just the squatty figure that's throwing it off for me. Also, the rim itself looks pretty big, but again, that might be the perspective we're seeing it at.
http://www.online-basketball-drills.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/basketball-hoop.jpg

waldo

Yeah maybe I should throw a ball and a real character in there as referance.

waldo

So I redid the red brick house today. Added some more variation.

I also added some water tanks on the rooftops as well as a untextured flag and some antennas. I will texture the all the signs and the flag later.

Next week I will redo the two last houses (thw white horrible one with all the windows and the highrise) and then try to fix the trees.



Anyone have any ideas for the lighting?

EvanL

Just a nitpick, the size of the courts are off. Regulation size is much wider and longer. Painted lines seem too thick because the court is too small. The half circle at the free throw line is too small, but it'll fix itself if you stretch the court out.

If you're going for a real run down court, the size doesn't matter too much. I'd replace the glass backboard and grunge up the painted lines or remove them entirely if you're going for run down. I've only seen glass backboards on nicer outdoor courts.

Here are actual dimensions. Although this one doesn't seem long enough either. It could just be me being out of shape huffing and puffing back and forth thinking it's longer than it is.


The rim also seems a bit large as well. And trees could use work as you already know. I can see buildings straight through them. Don't know how much you can do on mobile, but be nice to see some variation on the buildings. Some fire escapes, varying windows.

Really awesome work! I'm a bit of a basketball nut, so love this scene.

futurepoly

Oh yeah, this is really coming along!

waldo

I'm kind of taking inspiration from the NY court The Cage and that has a smaller court than regulation. I'll fix the rim and take another pass over the court texture to get it another step.

I will be adding more stuff to the houses such as I did today with the antenna and the watertower, some fire escapes could be quite simple to put together and would probably break up some of the houses great.

And yeah, the trees are a real pain in the ass. Early generation iPad and iPhones really suck at fillrate so the framerate really drops if you try to get a nice and thick tree. But I will make another try and see if I can't make two versions, one for high end devices and one for low end.

Thanks for the feedback, there will be more updates this week. Any tips for improvement is appreciated

waldo

Also, since the houses have actual extrudes for windows I could probably make some planes with boards etc so some are boarded up. Could look cool

waldo

I have fixed the last house and baked a high resolution lightmap. I will leave this court now for a while until the programmers catch up since this is going to be a actual game scene.



I will instead change focus to our main character. First I will have to thank an old classmate of mine, Felix De Puiseau, for the base character he sent me. Thanks mate!

Here is a snap of the base Felix sent me.


The idea is to have a customizable character so I will have to make it mobile friendly, beef it up a bit to match a basketball player and come up with a good system for adding clothes etc. I will probably split the character into one part per clothing item and add several skinned meshes to one skeleton ingame. I will also texture it to fit into the style of the environment.

Broadway

The court looks good, although I still want to see it with more buildings baked into the skybox like you mentioned, that's gonna look awesome.

I gotta say, I kind of did a double take scrolling down after your last post. It was like BAM - NAKED DUDE, totally was not expecting that in this thread haha. But it sounds like this is gonna become kind of a dev diary thread for you which is awesome, I can't wait to see how you set up the customizable character stuff!

waldo

Broadway wrote: »

I gotta say, I kind of did a double take scrolling down after your last post. It was like BAM - NAKED DUDE, totally was not expecting that in this thread haha.

You should be happy I hid the penis since Felix was kind enough to include that aswell

Yeah I will bake more houses into the skybox later on, will have the coders write up a script for me that does that if I can't find something on the Unity Asset store.

Will probably go over and polish the court a few times more before I call it done but I kinda want some gameplay there first so we see that everything works and I'm not doing a lot of work for nothing.

Will try to post about everything in the development. So yeah will be kind of a dev blog where you guys can help me improve the art along the way, since I'm the only artist here and coders aren't much to ask for feedback

waldo

I have started modifying the mesh I got and I think I'm on the right way. He is a little more beefed up and I have modified the face quite a bit. I haven't started the texture yet.



The idea is to have a caucasian and afro american male with three heads each to choose from. Therefor I will split the character and have the heads in their own texture and meshes. The body will be the same for both of them but with different textures while the head meshes and textures are unique.

Anyone got any tips or feedback? He is a bit naked yet but he will get some clothes that also will be changeable.

waldo

So, I have UVed and split up the mesh in two parts. Body and head so now I will be able to change head for te player. I have textured the head and will start on the body. I put the character ingame to see how it will look. We are using a BRDF shader with normals and lightprobes for light. There is a simple "spec" like in it but it is a lot cheaper than real spec and therefor doesn't look as good.

waldo

I have gotten the textures on the body in place and will start designing the clothes today.

waldo

So I decided on some base meshes for clothes today, will use three types of shorts/pants, three types of shirts and three types of shoes as bases and then variate textures on them.

Here is a first drawft of the Long Shorts base mesh, ust threw a texture on there so it isn't final.



Also, is my posts just so aweful that nobody answers or just so shocking that you are all sitting there paralyzed by the keyboard, come om wake up people! :poly124:

waldo

Fixed up some stuff at the shorts and made a tank top. Some shoes next!

waldo

Started working on a pair of shoes, all clothes so far have been made so I quickly can change colors and patterns with all details overlayed on top.

Only diffuse on these so far, no normal

waldo

Finished the converse shoes if no one has anything I should fix. I can now reskinn these with different colors/prints etc by changing the bottom layer in the PSD file.

waldo

I added some accessories that the player will be able to chooose from. Everyone looks badass in some aviators

waldo

I made the base for the long pants. Have a few base clothing items left then it's mostly texture designs that will have to be added.

Broadway

Looking good man! Aviators are awesome.

The pants seem a little short; I would expect them to be longer and bunch up around the ankles, like this:

waldo

Ahh, how could I have missed that. Will fix it and hope it doesnt create to much of a problem later on with animations and faces cutting through each other.

Thanks!

waldo

Fixed the mesh so the pants are longer and a little more bunched up by the shoes. Will resculpt it later on to get it into the normal.

Also tried my idea I had for creating variations of the clothes quickly since I'm the only artist on this project and have a lot of assets to create.

Anways here's a quick version with punisher print and the fixed pants.

waldo

I completed a pair of skate style shoes, threw a simple design on them and I think it works. Will be fun to create different designs from the same type of shoe later on.

waldo

Continuing on with pumping out bases for clothes.. Next up Basketball Jersey

cmc444

This is looking very cool!

waldo

Did two accessories, a basketball cap and a wollcap.. Will begin modelling a t-shirt today.

nufftalon

Looking awesome hopefully it plays as good as it looks.

waldo

thanks nufftalon!

I finished the base for the T-Shirt.. Also found a awesome print that I will have to get for myself