How to take stone walls to the next level? Adding geometry to assets that are usually flat?
Hi! I've recently been getting into environment art, and I've familiarized myself enough with the tools to sculpt and texture a stone wall, for example. However, just having a texture on a flat plane is lame nowadays. So I'd like to add actual geometry to the walls, such as protruding rocks. Same for the ground! A simple enough solution I've seen around are uniquely UVed stones/bricks, which are then just manually placed on top of the flat wall to create depth. That, however, doesn't look all that amazing in my opinion. It works I suppose, but I'm hoping to create more "next-gen" assets. It's for a top down game, so I'm assuming I can afford the extra poly count just fine. So I'm wondering how reasonable it would be to bake it down to a low poly version of the wall, just a decimated version of the high poly. That would give me the best looks, I believe. And yet I haven't seen this around! I've looked a lot around Artstation and all I see are flat walls with extra bricks manually placed on top. Why is that? Is it the poly count, or cause of the extra flexibility?
Other problem I have is that I'd like the walls to be in ruins, and spread all around a modular kit. That means I need to use those same bricks for pillars, corner pieces, window holes, circular bended walls, trim meshes, ground, and all this sort of thing that would allow me to create any kind of ruined environment from those walls. But I'm confused if I should re-mesh and uniquely texture the pillars for example, or just use the individual brick UVs. Also confused if the walls should be one-sided so they can have an arbitrary thickness. I'm confused about lots of things, basically. I'd love if you could point out a game's kit as example, or a tutorial you know of, or something of the like.
I found these two which are exactly what I'm looking for:
https://gamesartist.co.uk/dest-build-kit-roman-ageev/
These really helped me understand this kind of workflow. But they're using this flat wall approach and they don't cover all my questions. If you know of any other resource I'd love to hear about it.
Something else that helped were these kinds of images from Artstation.
But it's really difficult to find games that have full geometry for everything, instead of keeping it flat. Which makes me even more worried about trying this different approach, which might be the wrong way to go, I don't know. I'd really appreciate any tips! Thanks a lot 😄
Replies
Gears of War environments come to mind. although level designers / artists have deco'd this way for a long time, it was the first i had seen blocks of geo for environments as a process articled. generally, a level begins as a grey box, and these flat surfaces tie directly into design intentions, a very organic corner affects line of sight for a shooter, where if art impacts design, often time design is king. I'd recommend soaking up what you can find regarding their development process or post mortems (GDC talks), listen for other games or devs they were inspired by and go from there, you're bound to find high value content from them.
This is kind of last-gen, but should give you some ideas about how far you can take modular assets. Dig further back in the thread to find the modular bits. https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/1650367/#Comment_1650367
Gears of War info is here, just search the page for Kevin Johnstone: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments
Blending between textures, and using height info to modulate, that's a widely-accepted practice for getting lots of variation on tiled textures. An extreme example I reposted recently: https://polycount.com/discussion/174377/witcher-3-blood-and-wine-architectural-material/p1 and more in-depth info how to do it: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture#Modulation_Blending and you can do it on low-end hardware too (https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2502721/#Comment_2502721)
Thanks for the tips, guys!! I'll give it a shot. Cheers :D