[Q] How do you create nice 3D environment for mobile?

exoddinary

Hi there, I have a question. I'm using Maya and Unity for our mobile game development. We are quite new in 3D (before this we mostly do projects in 2D), so this may seem to be quite noob question ;

How to make beautiful scenery / environment for small scale level? Notice in the attachment, I just be able to use the the terrain from Unity, and seamless grass pattern. It looks too flat, uninteresting, and no variation. I want to create many elements in one texture but I don't know that, afraid that it kills optimization for mobile.

Tried looking for tutorials but couldn't find any suitable (mostly for AAA quality). How do you guys do this?

Deadly Nightshade

-Lightmaps
-Better textures
-Some interesting toony shader from the unity asset store

exoddinary

Hi deadly nightshade,

I know light mapping, better textures and stuff, but I was hoping for explanation particularly on variations in one terrain

jfitch

You could use vertex painting to do that, but I wouldn't recommend using the terrain system anyway...you'll have more control over the geo and texturing if you just make it yourself in your 3d package of choice.

AdvisableRobin

For your models, don't worry too much about your polycount.

Textures are going to be the biggest performance hog so find tricky ways to abuse your textures, look into atlasing or tiling.

Learn color theory. You don't have any special effects or post processing to make your game pretty so the materials need to standout on their own and work with each other.

Eric Chadwick

Many tricks available to help hide tiling artifacts.

Texture splatting, which means blending 2 or more tiled textures together on the same surface, is a good method and fairly inexpensive to render in realtime.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture

endeffect

You can use vertex color as mask to use different textures or just use vertex color to multiply with your diffuse texture and you will have some color variation at least. Using second texture with different tile to make variation is another option.

Rim light or fresnel shaders look really beatiful on cartoon environments IMHO. Just try what can you do with these and improve it.

As i see you need to make better lighting too, play with gi settings, get rid of those dark shadows and try to smooth your shadows.

dongyfeng

See what Blizzard did in Warcraft 3: they painted everything onto a set of tiling textures. The terrain looks like different textures layering on top of each other, but they actually are not: everything is painted. It doesn't need any complex shader (or even a programmable shader) to look good.

exoddinary

I tried, but anyway most importantly I am currently doing this for mobile platform, so I have to be careful on the drawcall. Not sure if I have to create 3D in Maya or just using Unity's terrain..

I had in mind to paint everything in one large map, not sure if its a good idea though.

exoddinary

And like this guys, I saw from polycount's competition thread. Its so beautiful and my liking. Considering I can do the art style, 3D modelling wise, should I model the ground, or just using flat with normal map?

Eric Chadwick

That shot is from League of Legends.

This blog post might help you.
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/features/dev-blog-defining-rifts-visual-style

Notice that their style is very "painterly". This requires strong painting skills. We have some tutorials here about stylistic texture painting:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/TexturingTutorials#Painting_Stylistic_Textures

dongyfeng

When I said a set of tiling textures, I meant a big texture with a lot of small tiling textures in it. So # of draw call should be 1.
It's really the art skill (painting) that makes the difference here.

Eric Chadwick

dongyfeng wrote: »

When I said a set of tiling textures, I meant a big texture with a lot of small tiling textures in it. So # of draw call should be 1.
It's really the art skill (painting) that makes the difference here.

Some tutorials about this method:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture#Sub-Tiles

exoddinary

Thanks maan.. These are lots of help. I will try out

exoddinary

Another side question, so I have to creat one full plane ( with certain details ) them texture map them like 4096 px2?

Eric Chadwick

No, 4096 is too large. That will use the whole texture budget, or nearly so.

Create your landscape model, then apply UVs that tile. Then decide how you want to use your textures. There are many methods. Which do you want to use?
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture

Depends on which shaders are available to you. What game engine is this? What are your limitations? Are you working with a programmer? If so, ask them what shaders you can use.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Shaders

exoddinary

http://haifengyu.weebly.com/anceint-village.html

What if I do something like this? Is the whole ground texture using the same texture map?

I want to find tutorial to do something like this but I don't know the right term. Fantasy environment?

lukors

Yeah, looks like the ground there has a single tiling texture. It looks like it has baked lighting per vertex to get the shadows.

exoddinary

Yeah, looks like the ground there has a single tiling texture. It looks like it has baked lighting per vertex to get the shadows.

Oh snap, I don't even knows what that means. Googling doesn't help me

exoddinary

http://www.paladinstudios.com/2012/07/30/4-ways-to-increase-performance-of-your-unity-game/

I just watched this. So does that means like few boxes of color in one texture map u just place certain vertices in uv mapping to match the color? Ive tried that once but it doesnt look the art style i wanted. But i might have to compromise my drawcall

Eric Chadwick

No. Paladin is using "vertex color" for the main colors, which is also multiplied with a wood grain texture for the fine detail texture.

We have some tutorials here
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Vertex_color