My concept is to have the course underwater and take place on a reef. I'm still putting my ideas together, but I'll have a bunch of corals, sea weed, shells, sea urchins etc... It should be pretty colourful, and I'm thinking of integrating at least 1 sort of sea creature to serve as an obstacle or tunnel.
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I look forward to seeing it develop! All the best.
I have this basic blockout of my course design for now
Next I'll start on a few tileable textures.
I think bright pinks, hot oranges, and deep blues and purples are going to bring this piece to the top of the competition if you pull it off right!
I also tried adding banking curves and stuff to my course, which I ended up scrapping because it didn't read well from the overhead camera, and ultimately were a bit glitch and annoying when I actually played the level.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXjUuZYnL-k"]Polycount Mini-Golf Contest - Reef 14/02/06 - YouTube[/ame]
I also did a 1st pass of the mine with a blinking shader, added some starfish, did a little rim lighting on the ball, made a skybox (cylinder with vert colors) and I made a procedural checker pattern for the green, so I haven't used a single texture map yet.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zmy7-G6ONI"]reef 140209 - YouTube[/ame]
I also decided to add a few sunken ship related elements so I can have wreckage in the background on the ocean floor, along with a few non natural elements to scatter around the reef.
Here is a test pass at a rusted out cannon.
I'll probably have an anchor, and a few bits of wood also since colour-wise they could be simple and I'm sticking with the vertex colour thing, while for the background stuff I could do nice silhouettes of masts with ripped sails and hull ribbing or something.
Can i ask how you got the vertex colours to show up in engine? I want to multiply my vertex with a diffuse map. Did you create your own shader for this?
Thanks. For the vertex colours to show up I used the visual shader editor, there is a vertex colour node you can use in there.
I'm going to try to get some ambient movement with at least the seaweed, maybe a few other elements to round out the scene in the coming week.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPL6-D5XvN8"]reef 140216 - YouTube[/ame]
I'm trying to think of other things to add, I'll probably add some treasure or something along those lines to the end of the hole, and maybe some fish. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrtJxGGmrdI"]reef 140217 - YouTube[/ame]
@Sharvo I'm at about 24000 tris (but a few things are set to double sided and I don't know if the engine counter is calculating those properly overall). An octopus is a great idea, I might just try to pull that off. I also thought about doing bubble particle effects, but I'm still trying to stick to this arbitrary no textures thing, while I could make procedural circles for bubbles, I don't think that would be great for mobile performance. I'll play around with light rays too and see if I can't integrate those nicely.
@anglorum Yeah I wish there was some sort of delay parameter on the transports so the camera could catch up with where the ball was.
You can play with the camera movement speed in the camera component.
-Ryan
Thanks Ryan, it works but makes the playthrough feel of my level too jumpy, I might just compromise with a combination of figuring out how to spawn a long particle that would still be visible on screen and quicker camera.
Wrote a script for you which adds the time to transport. So overwrite the transports script with this code then you will notice in the exposed components property there is a transport time field. Put in the value you want (in seconds). Do not edit the lua file just that field in the components tab.
Wow! Thanks a lot Ryan, the script works great, I thought you might do something awesome like this
Got a few test fish swimming around now.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hevz6y2aRQc"]reef 140219 - YouTube[/ame]
It is so clean and just gets better and better.
The fish are truly spectacular.
Awesome stuff!
Modeled, rigged and placed my octopus, not too sure about the colour, but I'm going to get some animation done tonight.
I got the octopus animation working. I'm no animator, so its a combination of flailing around/conducting an orchestra. I also placed some collision geometry on him, so when you shoot out of the cannon too hard you can bounce off of the octopus.
All I have left to do is a particle effect for the cannon shot and a few small modeling tasks.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MZY0eSkgA0"]reef 140220 - YouTube[/ame]
I'm really grateful for the extra week though, because the level I was intending to turn in at the time the extension was announced would have had no transports, fish, octopus, cannon, animation etc...
Ended up doing a simple particle effect for the cannon and added some treasure scattered around the place.
Would have liked to do a better particle, have an alternate fish animation and a bunch of other stuff but I figured I would call it done now (thought I had killed the fish at one point too).
The video is a bit, long, but I got carried away with trick shots and managed to get a hole in one.
The whole scene, when I counted up the meshes comes to 26,071 tris including the double sided stuff and the ball that came with the sample hole (though the editor polycount does display at around 30k, and I know it doesn't count double sided geometry properly)
Beauty Shots
Video
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SHUJxDyOyQ"]The Reef - YouTube[/ame]
Technical