This is a project I've been slowly working on in my downtime over the past few months. My goal was to create an entire environment using only one small texture sheet. I gave myself the subsequent set of arbitrary rules just to help focus my asset creation:
Use one 256 texture for the entire scene.
Every vertex must be snapped to the 8 grid.
Avoid aliased lines in the texture.
No alpha textures or single sided polygons.
I also wanted to try out Unity, so I used that to put the scene together and render some shots:
I love, love, love this... but I'm new to this forum, so please forgive me if it's wrong to ask... do you make your models available for sale as objs/fbx for use in other software?
I'm often looking for good toonish backgrounds for my non-commercial (and hopefully soon also commercial) animations
.
Super inspiring, and you really have done everything with that 256px that I ever could imagine. Now just add a huge monster that ruins the town and all is perfect! >=D Nah but seriously, what ever you do with it, it will be great. Good job!
This is my only suggestion too, Make some form of unique building to tie it together. Other than that it is very cool! Good job!
I was thinking the same thing. I've got a few "filler" spots on the sheet that ended up being unused, so I might be able to fit some new details in there.
I love, love, love this... but I'm new to this forum, so please forgive me if it's wrong to ask... do you make your models available for sale as objs/fbx for use in other software?
I've considered breaking this up into a model set and putting it on the Unity asset store just as a test. I'm undecided on it for now.
Do you plan on doing something special with it? Perhaps you could get it into a game like Cities Skyline so we can play with them?
Don't really have any plans at the moment, but I've thought about making a short fly-through animation. Sometimes my scripting abilities can come up a bit short when working in Unity though.
It looks amazing. really nicely done.... apart from the colour variation could have been handled with vertex colour!
I had considered that, but I like the "certainty" of throwing stuff on a different UV grid. It makes it easier to adjust colors globally, and I would have had to avoid welding that section for the entire project, or the color would bleed onto a surrounding trim.
That's totally awesome. I'm curious as to why the road texture occupies so much space? Surely you could have used half of the length you have?
It was mostly to reduce geometry. I knew there would be a lot of roads and having to tile it via cuts in the polygon would have added up quickly. This was kind of an issue with the buildings as well. If I were to do this again, I would probably have chosen a 512 and added more textural information. This would have cut down on polygons and allowed me to spend less time tinkering in the UV editor.
Would be interested in how you thought the atlas out.
I didn't really have a set plan starting out. My first texture was a brick wall where I found that a height of 16 pixels gave me the right amount of space to add the details I wanted. From there, I set up a 16x16 grid as my PSD background and tried to keep most things on the grid (or at least a power of 2). That made it easier to move UV islands around later if I needed to remap or move any sections. When creating/tiling a small section like a floor, I'd save them out to their own file and then paste them back in when done.
Awesome. how did you prevent the texture from becoming a blurry mess? Turn off mip maps or something?
In Unity, set the Filter Mode on the texture to Point.
In Sketchfab you can set the texture filtering to Nearest.
In 3DS Max, to make your renders not filter the textures go to Renderering/Render Setup.../ and turn off Filter Maps.
To fix your viewport you have to first go to Customize/Preferences.../Viewports/Choose Driver/ and revert from Nitrous to Legacy Direct3D. Restart Max.
Now go back to Customize/Preferences.../Viewports/Configure Driver/ and set the bottom Texel options to Nearest.
(I've found you might also have to disable Hardware Shading in the viewport options. To do this you can either go to Views/Show Materials in Viewport As/Standard Display with Maps or click on the text in the top left of the viewport, Smooth+Highlights+etc/Lighting and Shadows/ and click off enable Hardware rendering (Shift + F3 is the default hotkey). I don't think there is a way in Max to display unfiltered textures in the viewport while using the Nitrous Drivers.
Ahh brings me back to Golden Eye, Jet Force Gemini, Perfect Dark and so on.....but we had to break it down to 32x32 ha-ha
I think you have done a fantastic job. I love the style. Can not wait to jump into the environment. I applaud your tenacity, doggedness, perseverance and determination.
What exactly does "snap every vert to 8" achieve? At the scale you're working on doesn't that become meaningless? Like building a house and saying 'only use whole centimeters'?
What exactly does "snap every vert to 8" achieve? At the scale you're working on doesn't that become meaningless? Like building a house and saying 'only use whole centimeters'?
It meant more before I decided to complete the scene in Unity. While building stuff in Max, I worked in inches (1 Unit = 1 Inch) and kept every vertex on an 8 grid. This prevented me from even considering modeling details less than 8 inches. It helped quide my art direction, providing a consistency for trims and overall "chunkiness."
Replies
I could ask for more building variety but you've already stretched that 256 way further than I could have expected.
EDIT: I think it lacks a unique iconic building, maybe make a city hall with what you have?
This is my only suggestion too, Make some form of unique building to tie it together. Other than that it is very cool! Good job!
I'm often looking for good toonish backgrounds for my non-commercial (and hopefully soon also commercial) animations
.
The only suggestion I have would be to tweak the height and thickness of trees that are similar. All the vegetation seems too well manicured.
Other than that it's a very impressive scene.
Looks like a new gen Pokemon city.
Maybe you could add some curved or diagonal roads, for now it looks too much like a Sim city town
If you want to make it a complete, well composed scene, I would suggest adding smaller houses on the outskirts and a nice landmark in the middle.
Or just do whatever you like; I'm sure it will turn out stunning
I'm also surprised it looks that good with such a tiny texture stretched.
Do you plan on doing something special with it? Perhaps you could get it into a game like Cities Skyline so we can play with them?
Awesome work
It reminds me of being a kid and building habitats on grid paper.
I was thinking the same thing. I've got a few "filler" spots on the sheet that ended up being unused, so I might be able to fit some new details in there.
I've considered breaking this up into a model set and putting it on the Unity asset store just as a test. I'm undecided on it for now.
Don't really have any plans at the moment, but I've thought about making a short fly-through animation. Sometimes my scripting abilities can come up a bit short when working in Unity though.
I had considered that, but I like the "certainty" of throwing stuff on a different UV grid. It makes it easier to adjust colors globally, and I would have had to avoid welding that section for the entire project, or the color would bleed onto a surrounding trim.
It was mostly to reduce geometry. I knew there would be a lot of roads and having to tile it via cuts in the polygon would have added up quickly. This was kind of an issue with the buildings as well. If I were to do this again, I would probably have chosen a 512 and added more textural information. This would have cut down on polygons and allowed me to spend less time tinkering in the UV editor.
Amazing work!
Also, get it up on sketchfab. I'd love to look around at all the details.
I want to see the wireframes too.
+1 for the sketchfab or unity webplayer scene to scroll around
Sure thing. I saved out a small section below; the whole scene is probably too many polygons.
[SKETCHFAB]f877d8546518427190f586fb8a240ed0[/SKETCHFAB]
In Unity, set the Filter Mode on the texture to Point.
In Sketchfab you can set the texture filtering to Nearest.
In 3DS Max, to make your renders not filter the textures go to Renderering/Render Setup.../ and turn off Filter Maps.
To fix your viewport you have to first go to Customize/Preferences.../Viewports/Choose Driver/ and revert from Nitrous to Legacy Direct3D. Restart Max.
Now go back to Customize/Preferences.../Viewports/Configure Driver/ and set the bottom Texel options to Nearest.
(I've found you might also have to disable Hardware Shading in the viewport options. To do this you can either go to Views/Show Materials in Viewport As/Standard Display with Maps or click on the text in the top left of the viewport, Smooth+Highlights+etc/Lighting and Shadows/ and click off enable Hardware rendering (Shift + F3 is the default hotkey). I don't think there is a way in Max to display unfiltered textures in the viewport while using the Nitrous Drivers.
dont hit me adam!
I think you have done a fantastic job. I love the style. Can not wait to jump into the environment. I applaud your tenacity, doggedness, perseverance and determination.
Love it, keep it up.
Well done, I really like the style, it makes me feel happy! Haha.
All of that with a single 256 texture?! well done man :thumbup::thumbup:
As other suggested, I would love to see some unique buildings as well