Ascension Games

Oh man, theres alot that goes into creating a world.

Heres the process that I used in creating the screenshots below, and hopefully along the way, I can share info on my process, and maybe even learn something.

Lets go!

First thing I wanted to do,  was test out some geometry in both Max, and Zbrush. One of the problems we seem to have had in our previous efforts in designing is the” iterative-loop”. Thats a loop where an artist or programmer can see his / her work quickly in the game engine (in this case, Unity), and quickly make changes to that work, to iterate, again and again. Its how things get progressively better.

So first, being an artist, I wanted to try out the pipeline moving from one package, to another, and finally into the engine. So I quickly make some geometry in 3ds Max, making sure to keep only polygons (4 verts!) as we discussed in previous posts.  My Initial attempt left me with softer edges, and area’s where I didn’t get the resolution i wanted once I got into Zbrush, so I went back into Max and made the right adjustments to address those problems.

The exporting from Max to Zbrush was a bit tricky this time, I exported a mesh that didnt have a “bottom”. Its a poly saving technique thats becoming increasingly unecessary, but what happens in Zbrush when you import “open” geometry is your normals get all inverted. No problem, I sealed the mesh off again, and went back into z-town. I could have inverted the normals within Zbrush, but I didn’t want to create any further problems down the line.

In Zbrush, the thing you want to do with any rocky type surface is to make sure you turn off smooth edges for the first couple of subdivisions. This will give you some harder, faceted looking faces to work with. I subdivided 3 times in this mesh before turning smooth on, then subdivided even more. This mesh got up to about 4.5 million polys before I finished.

I used a collection of alphas from my own collection, and several of the resouces found on pixologics site to start working the rocky cliff faces, and layer upon layer, slowly working up the detail chain until my result was thus. I dropped down to the lowest subdivision level, and exported that as a OBJ, and generated a normal map with z-mapper.

This is all fine and dandy. If youve worked in this pipeline, this is nothing new.

Unity Time.

Now I took the .obj exported from Zbrush, into unity. Drag and drop. “It just works.” It comes in with a material assigned to it, untextured, and looking just as I intend. No fancy exporters. No weird intermediary formats, just an OBJ that nearly every 3d program can create, and unity eats it and asks for seconds. So i get to work on getting the normal map assigned, hook up the specular channels, and proceed to play with lighting a simple scene:

2 Lights:

-1 Directional light, which throws light in a direction for all objects in your scene. Think of it as the sun.

-1 Spot light. This is to highlight a specific area of interest. Also gives the materials specular highlights, and makes normal maps happy.

Looks ok. I replicated the geometry a couple of times, scaled and rotated the piece to be a bit more random. Not bad for an iterative start. I sent this screenshot to my coworkers, got some feedback.

-Looks a bit dark.

-Looks a bit shiney.

-Not much to go on.

-Questions about art direction.

All very valid points, and this being an iterative test, I take that feedback, and begin to work on a brighter, outdoor scene, with scale, and life, and some sense of scale. I’ll cover my follow-ups in the next post.

Check back soon!

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