First Environment Asset on Indie Game. Looking for Input.
polycounter lvl 13
Hi! I'm working on game for a friend and the engine is still fairly early in development. He only just added support for a lot of 3D pipeline stuff in the last couple weeks. The most recent thing we got working was baked lighting.
Anyways, I'm not new to working on games but I am new to doing environments and my role is to do 3D backgrounds for this 2D fighting game. As far as texturing goes I'm not familiar with stylistic approaches, so I'm doing things the way I know how which is largely from photosource and hand painted details. I've got one building done so far.
Here it is in the Max viewport:
Wires:
Here it is in the game with the baked lighting. Right now it's being lit by two direct lights imported directly from max. The cubemap/skybox is placeholder for now.
And my texture layout. The top half is entirely unique brick horizontal tiling brick while the lower left is for tiling strips and the lower right is for anything else.
Here's the reference I was provided by the other artist in the group:
My biggest concern so far is efficiency with textures, particularly the layout of things. The entire thing uses a 1024x1024 diffuse/normal/spec and shadowmap for the baked lighting in 2nd uv channel. The spec map contains specular power/exponent/reflection information.
If any environment artists out there have any tips/techniques or crits, I'll be glad to take em! My whole goal here is to just get better at this stuff and hopefully get a cool enviro out of the process.
Anyways, I'm not new to working on games but I am new to doing environments and my role is to do 3D backgrounds for this 2D fighting game. As far as texturing goes I'm not familiar with stylistic approaches, so I'm doing things the way I know how which is largely from photosource and hand painted details. I've got one building done so far.
Here it is in the Max viewport:
Wires:
Here it is in the game with the baked lighting. Right now it's being lit by two direct lights imported directly from max. The cubemap/skybox is placeholder for now.
And my texture layout. The top half is entirely unique brick horizontal tiling brick while the lower left is for tiling strips and the lower right is for anything else.
Here's the reference I was provided by the other artist in the group:
My biggest concern so far is efficiency with textures, particularly the layout of things. The entire thing uses a 1024x1024 diffuse/normal/spec and shadowmap for the baked lighting in 2nd uv channel. The spec map contains specular power/exponent/reflection information.
If any environment artists out there have any tips/techniques or crits, I'll be glad to take em! My whole goal here is to just get better at this stuff and hopefully get a cool enviro out of the process.
Replies
I was working on a one week product a month ago and my team didn't know how to stylize either. What I did was mess around with a mix of photo shop image effects. This ment that every one could work in their normal image sourcing ways then just convet with the selected styles and done! Cheap but if you do it right no one can tell.
When working with bricks, it's important to line them up in the correct position. The layer of bricks at the bottom of the lower windows is off; it should be exactly at the bottom of the windows, instead of a bit low. The bricks are also off at the ledge and the roof line, but those are less noticeable.
The amount of texture space you've devoted to the bricks might be excessive; with a bit of tesselation you could tile the brick texture and easily spend some of those savings on details for important areas such as the door. Of course, there's a constant battle between polygon counts and texture sizes, but the increase in polygon count should be modest for a dramatic increase in texture quality.
Also, assuming your engine supports it, there's probably no reason for the specular map to be the same size as the diffuse & normal maps. The specular in this case seems to be one of two values - either shiny & reflective for the windows, or matte for everything else. Try reducing the map's resolution dramatically (all the way down to 256 or even 128) and see if you can notice a difference.
Another general tip is to try to create modular pieces to simplify your job when working on the second (or twenty-seventh) building. Doors and windows are prime targets, since they tend to be similar in a given area.
I hadn't thought about using decals since I'm used to UDK as well where they're done in the engine's editor. But I realized after thinking about it that I could do them directly in Max using a decal texture sheet. Good idea!
I've actually already played with applying random photoshop filters. Nothing has looked very good so far though, unfortunately. It'd be nice if I found a filter that sort of magically gave everything a stylized effect that just 'worked'. That Borderlands last-minute style change comes to mind. Maybe I'll find something that works eventually.
Yeah, I can see it now. I don't think I'll be adjusting those too much since matching the reference exactly isn't really a necessity, and everything is nicely aligned to the grid right now.
Good call! I'll have to adjust those a bit.
I wondered about this. It seemed like a lot of space, but I wasn't sure how else to divide the layout of the texture sheet. Right now it's exactly half and it's tileable horizontally. Should I cut it down to 1/4 the texture sheet? It wouldn't be tileable anymore but it would allow more room for texture space.
You're absolutely right there. I hadn't even considered it. I bet it'll look fine at a much lower res.
Yeah so far I've been trying to build modularly, although I'm still relatively new to it so I'm not sure if I'm doing it efficiently. I'm thinking if I could make 3 or 4 unique building layouts I could probably build the rest of the scene from those.