Asset Creation

After last weeks efforts to identify ways to texture large objects and generally create performant assets, this week was all about implementing many of the concepts discussed last week by getting some objects in the unity engine. There were a few challenges that I needed to overcome during the week in order to finally get to a place where I can properly begin creating assets for the game. The first issue was with Polybrush. I had many problems getting the meshes I had created in blender to work properly with the shaders and tools in Polybrush. Meshes would sometimes have blacked out geometry on seemingly random areas. I seemed to have solved that problem after much trial and error, with the solution seeming to be limiting geometry that had harsh angles. The next problem was ensuring the level would look good while utilising tiling textures. The last thing I want is a game that looks repetitive and boring due to overuse of the same texture. The solution I came to involved a fair bit of research into how other games managed this problem, as tiling textures are essential to creating a game that runs smoothly.

Research

I looked at many other games and real life examples of castles and medieval architecture in order to build a proper picture of what they actually looked like and weather there were any tricks I could use to mask much of the repetitive tiling textures. In the game screenshot below (For Honor) you can see a fex examples of clever texture masking. The first is the ground on which the knights are standing, it uses a tiling texture that has been cleverly masked by miscellaneous objects such as rope, bricks and rock as well as a PBR water blend shader highlighted in the bottom left of the image. Above this is another tiling texture that has been masked by multiple objects overlapping onto it to cover up parts of it to hide the repetitive texture. And finally on the right of the image, although its not to do with tiling textures, an example of multiple cleverly overlaid objects can be seen on the wall/battlement. These are all tricks I plan to employ in the game in order to create optimized art assets that look good.

Real Life examples

I also went and studies many castles to get an idea of the materials used to construct them as well as how they are constructed. What struck me most about looking at all these castles was the complete lack of any embellishments or decorations on any of their surfaces. It seems that medieval castles were always built with functionality in mind rather than form. This quite interesting to me as I always imagine castles with trims and flourishes on every surface. The reality is castles could most accurately be presented with a single texture tiled across all of its walls and towers.

Personal Reflection

Quite a bit of time was spent working out the general aesthetic and optimizations for the environment art that will be implemented in the final game. On top of that much of my time this week was spent troubleshooting various issues with the environmental tools I want to use in Unity. Now everything seems to be resolved I can really start to churn out art for Deus Vault.

List of completed tasks for this week:

• Established visual aesthetic 
• Mastered required tools
• Began art implementation

-Tom Forwood