Now that all design relating to the mechanics was set and stone and good to go I turned my focused to creating all the environment assets for the game. The question was not what had to be done, but how to do it? Thus began my super exciting weekend of taking my knowledge of 3DS MAX to a whole new level! Rocks ROCK!First I began with a cube and a spherify modifier, the turbosmooth then created the extra geometry that would give it detail later in the process. If I felt like it needed more detail, I could just come back to this modifier and change the iterations to a higher number. After this I added two displace modifiers, the first would give it its shape with a cellular map, and the other would give it its detail with a noise map. By playing around with these I was able to get 3 different rocks in a short amount time. I kept the poly count at a medium level as I knew the computers we would be using for our game were not the best performance wise. These 3 rocks later became the 3 big mountains and rock piles you'll see in the final game. This picture shows how changing the turbosmooth iterations produces much higher quality rocks (at the cost of A LOT of polys). I then imported into Unity to see how the cell shader that Tim wrote would look on the rocks. Since the camera is mostly going to be pointing at the ground (constant angle of declination), I just payed attention to the areas close to the base of the rocks. It looked good, thus I started on improving the sand aesthetics. Making believable sand-While keeping in mind I couldn't do a high poly model for the sand due to performance costs, it was very hard to find the right balance between simplicity and detail. This took some time to get right. I began with the editable patch tool in 3DS max, this method produced some pretty awesome dunes, the only problem is that it took a considerable amount of time and it was a very detailed model. I took a step away from this method and began experimenting with the method I used to create the rocks above. By using the displace modifier and a mixture of different maps I ended up being able to make a 'Sand Ocean', but not 'Sand Dunes'. Then I wondered upon the holy grail of heightmaps. By using this heightmap alongside the displace modifier and cellular maps I was able to create a very low poly map that I was rather happy with, as was the team. From this process of a trial-error experimentation, I was able to cut the tri count from a whopping 51,200 to a mere 3200. Shrines of the gods-Philip Jackson does some awesome sculptures that managed to pop up on our FB page. I instantly fell in love with these and think they can fit extremely well with the feel of our game. These are now a big part of the inspiration for the design of the shrines.
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What is this BLOG about?This is basically my thoughts and whatnot as I improve as a Developer. Archives
June 2017
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