Shipwreck

Deathrey · Sep 2014

Gentlemen, i kindly ask for an advice $:\$
I've been tasked with making of a a shipwreck asset for a FPS game. Here is the concept:

Since this asset will be visible up close and the player can enter inside, I cannot think of a way to reach decent texture density while retaining all the the cracks/breaches in the wood.
Triangle budget is around 10k and there should be one 2k texture.
Can anyone share their ideas about correct way of doing it ?

JoshWilkinson · Sep 2014

Depending on what engine you use, you can tile the texture with a texture param. That shouldn't be hard at all.

Deathrey · Sep 2014

BringMeASunkist wrote: »

Depending on what engine you use, you can tile the texture with a texture param. That shouldn't be hard at all.

Target engine is Unity, with Skyshop shaders. I would certainly use tiling. The question is how to break up the texturing to keep wear of the wood different in various parts of the hull. For example, i do not want the moss to be spread out evenly. I also would like the wood near the bottom to appear soaked in the water, while the top parts to look mostly dried out. I've considered things like:
1) Baking out several variations of wooden planks, and using them to build the hull geometry from many separate pieces.
2) Using vertex blend shader to variate between wet, mossy and dry wood
3) Using floating geometry for moss.

Megacorpse · Sep 2014

I guess the best way to make it work is to combine different techniques. To me vertex blending sounds good for the wet bottom part and decals for the moss and eventual cracks.

Keeping track of this thread, it's helping more than one person.

Deathrey · Sep 2014

Megacorpse wrote: »

I guess the best way to make it work is to combine different techniques. To me vertex blending sounds good for the wet bottom part and decals for the moss and eventual cracks.

Keeping track of this thread, it's helping more than one person.

Also interested in what is considered best performance-wise.

DWalker · Sep 2014

You can use modularity, but only for some of the smaller pieces - portholes, railings, cleats. You could conserve texture space by modeling individual planks, but this could easily use up your polygon budget.

Railings of that sort would be extremely unlikely on a wooden ship. Most would have a solid, waist-high rail.

The bowsprit seems rather small for a ship of this size. I'd get rid of the dangling bit on the end; it wouldn't have remained like that through whatever destroyed the ship.

Just to further complicate your texturing, keep in mind that much of the hull - pretty much everything below the waterline - would have been covered with thin copper plates, so you could reasonably have everything from a bright copper to a deep green:

Deathrey · Sep 2014

I've decided to give it a go with tiling textures

I will use three versions of this texture:

One plain, another with some moss and the last one that should look dried out. They will be mixed with vertex blend shader.

Following suggestions, I've deviated from the concept, and replaced railing with the bulwark, increased bowsprit size, etc.

Here is how the wire looks so far:

DWalker · Sep 2014

You might want to use an alpha mask to make the broken edges rough rather than relying entirely on geometry. A fairly small dictionary of broken pieces would give you a great deal of variety and detail at a relatively small cost.

There seem to be some problems with the normals around the hole in the forward hull.

Deathrey · Sep 2014

DWalker wrote: »

You might want to use an alpha mask to make the broken edges rough rather than relying entirely on geometry. A fairly small dictionary of broken pieces would give you a great deal of variety and detail at a relatively small cost.

There seem to be some problems with the normals around the hole in the forward hull.

Thanks for the reply. Could you please go a bit into details regarding how exactly would you use an alpha mask here. Does it have to use second UV set?

onionhead_o · Sep 2014

cool project keep going

[NB] Mohsen · Sep 2014

From what I know, an alpha mask should be able to work with the same UV set as your normals, diffuse, AO etc.

Deathrey · Sep 2014

[NB] Mohsen wrote: »

From what I know, an alpha mask should be able to work with the same UV set as your normals, diffuse, AO etc.

I'm using overlapping UV's to tile the main texture, so I cannot use same UV's for alpha mask.

DWalker · Sep 2014

This bit from the CryEngine docs seems close to what I was thinking of:http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC3/Using+Decals+for+Destroyed+Structures.

Deathrey · Oct 2014

DWalker wrote: »

This bit from the CryEngine docs seems close to what I was thinking of:http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC3/Using+Decals+for+Destroyed+Structures.

Thanks for the link. I'm not sure how to apply that in Unity though.

Here is my progress so far:

Triangle count seems a bit high, especially on the anchor chain. Anchor with its cable is at about 10k triangles so far.

CandyStripes05 · Oct 2014

really impressed so far, feeling inspired - deff following

pmiller001 · Oct 2014

Awesome man!
I cant wait to see more. I might try to do the same thing, this looks like a lot of fun!

indiedungeon.com · Oct 2014

This looks fantastic, keep it coming!

DWalker · Oct 2014

Depending on how close the player will examine the chain, it can be modeled as a series of planes with an alpha mask (a normal map is nice, too) that are close to perpendicular to each other. From some angles, the player will spot the illusion, but it actually works amazingly well from most points of view.

If that approach doesn't work, then remember that you don't need to model the holes in the chain; very few players will look closely enough to see the difference between holes created by the texture and holes defined by geometry.

Deathrey · Oct 2014

DWalker wrote: »

Depending on how close the player will examine the chain, it can be modeled as a series of planes with an alpha mask (a normal map is nice, too) that are close to perpendicular to each other. From some angles, the player will spot the illusion, but it actually works amazingly well from most points of view.

If that approach doesn't work, then remember that you don't need to model the holes in the chain; very few players will look closely enough to see the difference between holes created by the texture and holes defined by geometry.

I will use these techniques for less detailed LODs, because player will be able to get inside the wreck and touch the chain

But what do you guys think about triangle count. Is 22k a fair amount for a LOD0 of this asset?

DWalker · Oct 2014

It really depends on the target platform and what else is visible in the scene. 22k would be very low for a current console or PC, especially if it's taking up most of the screen. Even most mobile devices should handle it easily as long as the rest of the scenery is modest. If, on the other hand, you have a ship graveyard featuring a few hundred similar ships... All the more reason to get it into the engine as quickly as possible.

Shipwreck

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