Hello everybody
A few days ago I posted on reddit the picture showing the design flow of one of my levels.
Some people asked me if I could provide a more detailed information on that development flow, so here I am
I get from time to time the help of some freelancers but I'm mostly on my own, so for better or worse I can/have to cut some corners when it comes to the common design "steps".
I guess it should all start with a concept art or some sketches, but considering that I would be creating a concept art for myself I just skip this part, trusting I can translate whatever idea/feeling I'm having directly to a 3d software.
Some people will probably recommend doing a sketch even if it's just for yourself, I've tried doing that, but I find it more productive to skip that part.
My "mental concept art" is more like a "feeling" rather that detailed representation, I have an idea of where the key elements are but I usually think on terms like "super sunny place", "massive volcano" or "peaceful lake".
Then I move to blender, I'm not a 3d artist, so I guess I cannot really give you really nice tips on this. I usually start off with a basic shape and then start extruding faces to match the basic idea that I had in mind.
As soon as I have a skeleton more or less solid I export it to fbx and give it a try on Unity, the reason for this, is because sometimes the geometry looks nice but gets into the mechanics (e.g.: walls that can be climb and are not supposed to, slopes that cannot be walked on, places to far from each other, etc).
Then go back to blender and modify this until this basic skeleton is "compliant" with the key mechanics and gameplay requirements.
The next step is UV Mapping. Again, sorry to disappoint you but I'm not a blender guru, I just isolate each material and unwrap it using “Smart UV Project”, usually works decently enough and I only have to modify a few faces manually. After that is time to export and get back to Unity.
I have a set of cartoon textures, mostly bought from the asset store, some of them from freelancers and just a few made by me. But the levels on FreezeME are considerably big, so if I just drop these textures into the model they will look either very repetitive if the “Tiling” values are too low or look terrible if they are too high.
To solve this I use 3 methods:
1. 3d props placementSometimes you can break that visual pattern on the textures including some 3d elements, for example here I've added some 3d step rocks here on the grass:
2. Triple texture shader:Basically just a shader the blends 3 textures with different tillings., again braking the noticiable texture tiling pattern. (This is the juicy part of the code):
void surf (Input IN, inout SurfaceOutput o)
{
fixed4 main = tex2D(_Texture1, IN.uv_Texture1);
fixed4 text2 = tex2D(_Texture2, IN.uv_Texture2);
fixed4 text3 = tex2D(_Texture3, IN.uv_Texture3);
main.rgb = lerp (text2.rgb, main.rgb, _Blend1);
main.rgb = lerp (text3.rgb, main.rgb, _Blend2);
main *= _MainColor;
o.Albedo = main.rgb;
o.Alpha = main.a;
}
And this is how it looks in game
3. DecalsWell, not much explanation required here. Just placing decals wherever I see fit
Once all the texturing is done then I start populating the level…
At the beginning I was placing these objects randomly here and there, just scaling them up differently, but didn't like the end result.
After trying different methods I came up with the one that I'm finally using. If you see most of the screenshots ingame you will see that the small/medium props are rarely alone, they are always creating shapes, lines or paths.
This might not look realistic, but I guess it adds up to this cartoon feeling and also to break the monotony of some levels.
And the last of the preprocessing effects, is baking all the static lights. This is a long trial and error process
. I first try with the main directional light and only bake the level structure, after multiple tweaks, when I'm happy with the results I bake the other lights and include all the geometry.
And finally last but no least, the postprocessing effects.
This is how they game looks without any.
First I apply some Color Correction to saturate the picture:
Then I add Bloom :
Then some tone mapping to map the color values to LDR
And finally Depth of Field
I could write a book on the multiple issues I had implementing Depth of field but I won't bother you with that at this very moment
.
Hope you find this useful!
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