Arctic Base - Pixel Textures in Unreal

polysteve

Been lost in unity world for too long so I decided to do some environment work in Unreal. Plan is to do that trope of an arctic research base that stumbles on some cosmic horror deal. 

Basing the piece on Xixin Guo's work but doing like a pixel art/stylized approach because it sounds fun and is super quick compared to doing something more realistic
Concept: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qADwxa

Current Progress:

polysteve

Here's the current textures I'm using for the whole thing. I'll probably double this by the time I'm done which isn't too bad


All the textures are hand painted including the normal maps. It was too complicated to try and bake a normal map down when my texel density is about 32px/meter. I pretty much just painted specific values in each channel on the edges and I think it came out ok. Normal maps are the only textures I'm allowing the engine to blend via filtering so it hides any of my errors from painting them


The values were sort of arbitrarily selected based on an image of a sphere normal map and guessing what angle I wanted the normal to take

rexo12

looking good! Maybe it would be helpful to paint height maps and use a utility to derive normals from those? e.g. Substance Designer or I believe the engine library even has a material function for that.

iam717

Looks great, but the stairs annoy me greatly, perhaps those caution designs every other step or every 2nd +(so on and so on) perhaps just yellow?  fun looking thing you got going on.  Edit if you see it, added an idea perhaps - - - -  lines instead of <<<<<.

polysteve

@rexo12  Ooooo true it probably would be easier to just make a height map for some of these more complicated shapes. Wonder how well they'd work with such a small texture size 🤔

@iam717 Yeah definitely agree, think I've been staring at it too long to notice. I've got space on the sheet to break it up, will definitely fiddle around with it thanks!

Made a smidge of progress but been pretty busy getting ready for GDC in a few weeks! Can't wait to hang with some fellow devs!
Got some smaller props made, mostly crates n small tools. Still gotta mess with the roughness for the barrels and stuff as they're too shiny atm. I left some space in the texture for some other ideas I had so I can just fit it in later. Though I wanna have that retro texture look I don't actually care about that level of space efficiency so it's fine if there's some unused pixels in the end.

Next will be looking at actually sculpting in the ground and making some snow variant textures for it. Not sure if I should make the ground a more old school jagged type terrain or let it be smoother using unreal's built in tools. Will have to fiddle around with it

Ashervisalis

Neat!!