Look up there, the wonderful sunshine, that the boys had better see nothing of!
I don't think they are to be honest, things are actually starting to take shape, who knew that "Houdini" could be such a time saver?
Jona : Much like Lech I'm amazed at how amazing Houdini is as a generator of... Things, after countless tutorials I'm starting to get the hang of it, finally!
That's the start of a mushroom grower! Ok, so I accidentally didn't save and then it vanished in a crash with this... Now as I'm writing, I remember that there are auto saves! I've gotta check that folder! More on that next week.
Let's take a look at the wall that I've shown off in earlier recaps.
I agree, it doesn't look very good, at all, but now it contains everything needed for a finished game asset, let's walk through the elements.
First of, there's visible geometry, we have walls with columns and some rocks, all of these are completely procedural and are created based upon a single curve, you know how fast you can draw a curve? Seconds, literally! Editing it is just as easy and quick!
Secondly, see those light green lines within the walls? Those are colliders, these are generated from the walls and heavily reduced in precision (read as poly amount) to make collisions less costly.
As you can see above, the same goes for the rocks.
Third we've got the materials, the wall and columns are auto UV unwrapped and painted with vertex colors, the shader in the case of these walls blend up to three different textures spread over red, green and blue. The UVs are actually world space dependent so the texel size will be constant across all elements, I've changed the material tiling here to make them stand out a bit more.
Now let's look at the rocks again, for UV-mapping them is on a whole new level of difficult, they're all randomized and as you can see, their shapes are hugely varied!
Let's take a look at the UVs.
As you might be able to tell, these are just slapped on using an orthographic plane projection, why then, do the rocks not look like
this?
Well, while I in the future would like to try and create pelt-maps based upon a seam created from the Y intersection plane from my terrain, I in this case wrote a simple tri-planar shader, which uses two textures (but three samplers) for left/right, front/back and top/bottom texture projection based upon world space normals.
I've created a version of it in Shader Forge which you can download here, you may use it in any project, including commercial ones, as long as you like Eco Tales on Facebook!
That's all for me this week, next week will be all work! Which for me means all play! I love game development!
