Sometimes in gamedev you have to take a step backwards in order to move ahead, even if that means abandoning work you were quite pleased with.
After having created a number of textured asteroids with normal and AO-maps, we ran into problems regarding colliders. It turned out that our requirements for the asteroids were difficult to achieve with the present design.
On the one hand we needed asteroids that were movable objects in the physics world, but we also wanted to land on them with mining shuttles and drones. Since physics objects in Unity need to have convex colliders with a limited number of triangles (maximum of 255), these two requirements did not add up. If we used simplified colliders for our asteroids, landing on them would look bad in many cases.
To solve the problem we chose to make simpler asteroids made up of several low-poly segments. This also made it possible to procedually create varied asteroids, something we always wanted to do but had posponed.
A test with procedurally generated low poly asteroids. These new asteroids are of course much less realistic looking than both the original ones and the ones we made with normal and AO-maps, but in a way this look is more in line with the clean art style we have chosen for the rest of the game.
The new asteroids in the game.