Ideas for artist tools
ngon master
I'm sure we've all thought of tools, add-on, scripts, or seperate programs that would be cool to use to help create game art, I figured it'd be cool to have a place to share and discuss ideas, and maybe suggest things that already exist to people. Don't share any ideas that you don't want stolen, but any tech artists, please pm the user before creating something just as a courtesy.
I've had a few things I'd like to see:
Aplication that procedurally deforms high poly rock sculpts.
You take a rock from zbrush or another application and add wear. It'd have options such as rock tumbler, wind and water errorsion, add gravel/sand/snow, etc.
Flow maps used for wind direction in a game engine. Might be possible in udk with a little material editor magic, but I don't have the technical knowledge to pull it off.
Cave generator, generate procedural stalagmites and stalactites for cave.
I've had a few things I'd like to see:
Aplication that procedurally deforms high poly rock sculpts.
You take a rock from zbrush or another application and add wear. It'd have options such as rock tumbler, wind and water errorsion, add gravel/sand/snow, etc.
Flow maps used for wind direction in a game engine. Might be possible in udk with a little material editor magic, but I don't have the technical knowledge to pull it off.
Cave generator, generate procedural stalagmites and stalactites for cave.
Replies
, so how exactly do you translate what it does to UV's to somethign that works with the world postion offset.
the idea for adding gravel, sand or snow could be done to great effect in udk with a shader that does blending based on the normal map, and a up vector or the wind vector.
been thinking about that. there's a script for max from a talented german fellow (forgot his name), which auto generates rocks in Max with the help of displacement maps. Maybe a similar displacement workflow could be used to modify existing stuff...
I've actually been considering giving this a go for many years. Photoshop is ancient and creaking now, built on old-world principles and technologies (the concept of a desktop program implementing its own paging algorithm in 2013 is hilarious) and does a lot of content creation stuff awkwardly due to its heavy reliance upon and heritage from traditional photography techniques. It's a crazy amount of work though. It's a shame Paint Shop Pro didn't go in this direction, preferring instead to be a bloated photo suite specifically, because a few years ago it was a real competitor for 3D art.
Blender has painting tools that do things like seams properly automatically, but they're very slow.
I'd like to see tools for editing UVs and having it copy the texture pixels around so you can experiment with layout without having incomprehensible blank islands in front of you. (consider padding) It'd also have to take into account normal maps when rotating/etc. Could be interesting!
So, a cheap, fast, simplistic but powerful toolset for texture editing specifically. *throws on ideas pile*
The very best tools, however, solve the problems you weren't even aware you had, and then you see what they can do, and kaboom, wow. ZBrush in particular.
For me there would be one killer tool to rule them all : a screen-based mirror tool, working just like the built-in Windows and OSx magnifiers, simply showing a mirrored view of whatever is displayed on screen.
Options would be : drag a window to select the desired area to mirror, click to define the location of the vertical plane, and a toggle for left/right. That's about it!
Now SOMEONE DO IT! hehe
Of course it doesnt deform meshes, but you could use it to create an alpha/and or height map.
Terrain erosion...I'm about 95% sure you could create a graph that does this.
ps: I feel like I'm missing the point of this thread, if so, sorry.
But better. With custom servers and friend lists and voice chat and layers and custom brushes and file replay.
Would be amazeballs.
If the paint tool knows that the D/N/S files are D/N/S, it could also preview the finalized result too.
Yes. This. All of this. Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to make, either. This is something I've been wanting for awhile.
For UDK, I was thinking it would really save a lot of time if there was an auto-import and material creation. So rather than importing 32 textures for 8 materials, changing import settings for normal maps, creating materials, hooking up nodes, there would be a system that automatically does it for you. It could read the suffix of your file (brick01_diffuse, grounddirt_normal, etc) and base it's decisions on that. After you could go in and tweak these basic materials to your liking. Maybe on the tool's interface you could select common options like
brick01_material: texture coordinates: 4, 4
displacement: -2, 5
tessellation: 6, 4
normal map strength multiplier: 2
etc etc
I'm working on a town scene right now, and am starting with generating tiling textures. Just to see what one of my textures looks like takes ages, especially when there's a bit of lag inbetween each node hook up, so I usually just test them out in Marmo instead.
This is kind of what the latest UDK drop allows you to do.
Import your textures per material, and tweak them in real time in UDK.
There is a video about it here
For AlecMoody's, JamesWild's, ZacD's and equil's suggestions, these are all existing or planned features of Substance Designer as Paradan said. There is still work to be done on the painting side but we are working hard, and in the right direction it seems, reading what you guys wish for
As for my own ideas, painting on a mesh with "physics based paint" would be killer, like brush strokes dripping down on the mesh realistically.
There's some pretty big differences between working on a high poly model and tweaking the textures on a model, you can get amazing results with udk and blending, and mixing normal maps, but sometimes it's nice to have a nice clean high poly model. If I was working on a scene, and there was some pretty sharp and unique rocks that I wanted to reuse for an area near a river that needed some wear and deformation to look right, you can't just tweak the normals and expect an equally detailed result. You can make the normals look smoother, but you would also need to soften the edges. I just think it'd be cool to have a highly detailed application that would allow you to have extremely clean and detailed high poly models that are also reuseable without having to spend a lot of time resculpting. Different types of wear really causes unique looking damage to rocks, more than just swapping a texture.
Basically once you have a bunch of layers you want to instance across, say, different groups, you can package them together as a smart object, then duplicate that using regular ctrl-j. Once that is done, all the copies are instanced to each other (which is a bit of an unexpected behavior actually!) and can be placed into different groups. I use this ti share my base bakes with all the necessary tweaks.
To un-instance a smart object, simply open it as if you were about to work on it, then drop all the contents in the original document again (and eventually, create a fresh smart object out of that).
I've done this in UDK for a current RTS game project. Whilst I'm not inclined to give away the magic in it's entirety just yet, it basically works by drawing numerous small gradients and modifying their direction and anisotropy using a flow map.
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I wonder what kind of tools they used to go from 2000 cube maps to projected on geometry, or if it just took a lot of man hours. I'm sure we'll see a lot more real world data collection for future games.