The Architecture 5: Keep Modelling…

Come to update the latest progress of the project.

Now just finished the last two giant buildings on the top right of the painting. Seems quite exciting but still great many of the small pieces everywhere ohhhh hope I could finish all of them…

Anyway. Kind of getting bored with these models of the same kind of vivid colours and I don’t feel in this effect they look as good as the ‘sketches’ in Blender. By the way that inner organ like thing was really crazy to model…

But the screenshots in Blender in the unfinished editing scenes look very cool and technical, especially with the blank and missing-data shapes! I suddenly feel that it would be a great modern version related card product or something.

 

I can actually choose the Unlit texture shader in Unity so that it would look as flat as in Blender windows because they wouldn’t accept the lights and shadows from the environment. I’ve talked about this before and then felt it’s still better to have some more 3D ones. This is really contradictory maybe I just don’t get the good way to balance these knotty needs. Who knows.

A small ‘documentary’ here!

The Architecture 4: Experiments with Water

The third big building seen in the game mode (with some vignette and bloom camera effects, just the experimental version), and also the newly updated painted skybox, fog and some faraway mountains!

Didn’t really care about the upper and downside parts because they’re out of sight, and now flaws are that although I made distortion close to the sides, they still act quite square-like in the scene. And the seams can be seen. I’ll leave it for now.

The “real colour” in scene. And there’s a black ball inside to make the shadow effect..

I used two pairs of particle systems to make the two fountain things. One dropping column of water and one for the spray (because it seemed not very natural and also it’s rather complicated to make the collisions so I’d fake it).

The renderer I used is stretched billboard so that the water seems quite coherent but not like stupid squares. Higher emission rate than the default setting and a decreasing curve of the size to make it like in the painting that rather smoothly flowing at first and getting thinly scattered later. I also set the order in layer to 1 or the particles would be weirdly blocked by the river water in scene mode. And for the material, I tried all kinds of shaders including the particles ones and water ones in FX and chose the Water 4 in Unity’s standard assets, and used my sky texture (which is exactly a white to dark gradient) for the internal reflection.

For the bouncing spray I used a capsule mesh instead of a billboard.

 

The Architecture 3: Painting Texture & Physics

I found I was being so stupid to paint the textures using just Photoshop based on the exported uv “blindly” before, it was so slow and painstaking and there were quite a lot flaws because of the non-contiguous seams. And I learned from the Night Cafe Project that he used Mudbox to paint the bitmap directly and turns out nice so I am considering to get one too.

But I used Blender’s texture painting this time for the new building. It’s much easier than use only Photoshop although the hardness of the brush is unchangeable and it turns out the vague edges which is quite unpleasant.

I also tried the unlit shader as used in the Night Cafe which creates an amazing painting-styled environment. It’s kind of a 2D-like 3D, but I have to say at this stage the flat colour is not really compatible with others and everything needs to be changed if I wanted them to fit. I’m going to change the skybox, but I have no idea if I can manage the terrain and plant. Also the style of Bosch is more realistic and not like Van Gogh’s, and there’ll still be reflective materials like glass and metal so, I’m not sure now but maybe it’s not suitable for mine. But it’s good to know this technique.

Anyway I’ve just finished the second big building and I tried more with the joint physics which was used on the hanged red ball on the above pink building.

This time I tried to make the branches waves so I gave it a try to separate them into pieces and add joint physics. So as how people make rope physics, the tip one is the child of the former one which is again the child of the one before it… But if I still use hinge joint then they’ll collapse like a hinge will do and a branch is not gonna be soft as that. So I tried fixed joint. It turned out nice to wave like a branch but the problem was it would soon stop even though I turned of the drag coefficient. And then my solution is to tie something transparent as hinge or add some constant force to the top ones, as well as add their mass.

For those grow upwards I unchecked the “use gravity”, just use hinge joints and add an upwards constant force to the top one, so it moves like a balloon – maybe they seem a bit too much “enchanting” for a branch though.. Just because fixed joints don’t wave so much and would stop soon even if I added force. There might be some solution to the fixed one though….

Hopefully it wouldn’t seem “so much” after the other moving elements (creatures) are added later.

The Architectures 2: Start with the Giant Building

Finally finished something again to post a blog! I was making one of the most complex buildings (I hope it will be the most, but…huh), and the texturing, occlusion / all kinds of maps of the complexity drove me even crazier than modelling, placing and the combination, which seems just alright from this not really perspective view of speciosity, while it did become like impossible when it came into 3D… and also don’t ever forget the terrain and humans to see if they will be able to fit in.

Anyway this completely pink squid building has now appeared in my scene. Seems I’m getting more familiar with drawing textures baking lightmaps setting materials things but, this is only one of the five equivalent complexities… so good luck and hurry up I can’t afford to spend as long as this for them…

There is one thing special I’ve done to this building. I just took the attempt to search for the rope physics and there are plenty of tutorials so this became something a bit more interesting in this scene so far… I hope the tree can wave too but I don’t want to bother with the tree system now and there is nothing in my assets looks similar to this.

Some other small things before I started with this pink building:

 

For things with decorative elements of multiple materials, I duplicate the model, make it just a little bigger and give it another fade / transparent shader or rendering mode, with a height map. Like the bump circles in the left pic and some metallic rust in the right. There is a subtle difference in reflections when you move around which looks quite nice.

And these are just simple rigid bodies so that the berries are rolling around, and when you walk there to kick them away.

The Architectures / Artefacts

(Now my plan is to use a third person controller in a nude human’s shape to go through this place. I haven’t made it and I’m just using the default one at the moment.)

This post is about the architectures or artefacts – not really sure what I should call them – that I have done so far.

The working process is I create everyone in Blender, export UV, paint in Photoshop according to how they look in the painting (not edit the painting to fit the UVs), and make a suitable material in Unity. Sometimes it would need to go back to Photoshop, change the patterns and reapply them again and again to reach the satisfactory effect.

There are always times that I hope I can write my own shaders when I find it difficult to get the effect I want, especially for the cutout/reflective things. Actually I don’t know well about those so many kinds of maps in the shader’s parameters so the learning process has been numerous experiments (well I think I should find some tutorials to go through these systematically). But so far things turn out not bad.

I didn’t want to bother with the plant branches and vines so I used cutout/fade shaders on some planes rotated to all angles to make sure they can be seen from everywhere. I hope they can wave like grass, but terrain grass waves like the whole thing moves (the root should be fixed) so I gave it up. The planes don’t seem as good as the real models though.

The glass ball has some cracks. But I didn’t find a proper setting for both the semitransparent  and the solid crack, so I duplicated the ball and allocated them two different shaders to compose like a single object.

And the orange stele, with the ball on it, has 400 pearls placed manually… A single texture would not have different materials, and the cutout texture would not look solid and reflective even with height map. I think there must be a better professional way to do it, and it’s like I just forced it very stupidly. It’s like a manually made luxury, isn’t it..