post-apocalyptic level design
polycounter lvl 15
Hi guys, long time no see 
I'm working on a post apocalyptic level for a game right now. Won't go deep into the story but basically the whole planet is flooded after atomic war and the survivors live in small floating cities.
Quite a lot of stuff to model and design so I'll be chucking it all here.. It's low poly diffuse textures only work. No lights in the scene or anything like that so the diffuse textures needs to do all the job
Would love to hear your critics!
First off is a statue of liberty.. will be drown in a water from the neck down. I had a big problem to make the definition of the form stand out under all that dirt. I tried to manually paint in some shadows and speculars, which helped a lot, but I'm still not sure if I like it.. will see how it blends with the rest of the environment.
I'm working on a post apocalyptic level for a game right now. Won't go deep into the story but basically the whole planet is flooded after atomic war and the survivors live in small floating cities.Quite a lot of stuff to model and design so I'll be chucking it all here.. It's low poly diffuse textures only work. No lights in the scene or anything like that so the diffuse textures needs to do all the job
Would love to hear your critics!
First off is a statue of liberty.. will be drown in a water from the neck down. I had a big problem to make the definition of the form stand out under all that dirt. I tried to manually paint in some shadows and speculars, which helped a lot, but I'm still not sure if I like it.. will see how it blends with the rest of the environment.
Replies
The "bricks" are supposed to be plates of oxidized cooper - I draw it myself, that's probably why it does not look like it
Also you patterned them in Brick style, they should go aligned one on top of the others.
You could take a similar approach to the boat, lightening the top surfaces and the tops of the tires to show more form. Maybe make the boat two colors to make it more interesting? Or maybe that conflicts with the game design.
True this. My brain's response was sort of like this:
Car! no wait. pickup truck. APC? oh the text says it's a boat.
You'd probably be better off with bumpers/buoys like:
which would also give you some extra happy colours in there.
Could you post a shot of the assets as they would appear in-game? Final resolution/angle etc. Because the shot with water looks really pixelated, and from topdown you don't get much use of the polies spent on the cargo area.
The statue needs to have her left side/arm rounded out a bit. If you want to save polies you can weld the tips of her crown (except the broken tips) and merge a couple of verts at the elbow/sleeve. From the looks of it she'd going to be submerged in water? If so, make sure to add some water line damage and algae:
Yeah, but he doesn't want to get sued by Warren Spector or J.J. Abrams...
Vladino, you have to paint in a lot more pronounced lights and darks to depict the folds of cloth around her shoulder. Right now the entire torso looks far too cylindrical.
I started building the post-apocalyptic town on the water.. the normal houses will look like the ones in the picture and will be scattered around the level.. and then I'm planing to have few bigger structures like the Statue of Liberty to break the generic feeling.
As usual - please let me know what you think, thanks!
And in-game shot:
The blue water stuff at the bottom of the town base texture is for blending in the game - as the underlying water layer has the same texture so it will look like it's fading into the depth.. easy trick taking no performance penalty and not using transparent texture
..and in-game..
Oh and some stats as well.. the town has 501 tris including the base and i used two 512^2 textures which i may resize to smaller ones to save texture space, at least for the base..
I would maybe go ahead and change the color of the water, at the moment it looks like pool water. Darken it up a bit so it looks more like a ocean. Also, if it's supposed to look like New York has been flooded, it would be cool to be able to see some structures undernearth the water surface(if you can do it with your budget)
Keep up the good work!
I'm finding it really hard to settle for a certain style and colours, any ideas how to decide?