Hello folks!
Today wee would like to share with you some info about colorful details that you could see in The End of the Sun game. Our game is placed in Slavic fantasy world so what could look more Slavic than colorful flowers paintings on old wooden buildings.
We will start crowdfunding soon where you will be able to support us and get the game. Follow us on Kickstarter or add to our mailing notification Here. It will help us to get more attention on start of campaign what is very important for small teams like ours.
We are a small team from Poland. There is 3 of us, but only 2 team members work full time on our project. More about the team and about us you could find in other section HERE
…but Let’s go back to our topic :)
In search of unusual details for our game we went to a small but really beautiful village in Poland called Zalipie. (It’s known in Europe as the most colorful Polish village)
For the curious:
What’s more interesting word “Zalipie” In polish means a place behind the place where lindens grow. Yes, Polish language is very short sometimes. :D (Za = behind , Lipa = Linden ). In Poland names of villages was very often created from tree/plant word variation like “Dąbno” (oak village) or “Brzozowa” (Birch village). That is based in strong connection of slavic folklore (and believes) with nature.
Flowered inscription from “Painters House” (museum)
For years, Zalipie village has been famous for its extremely colorful, flowery painted huts. The tradition of painting is passed down from generation to generation and its cultivation for the inhabitants of Zalipie is very important.
Thanks to the kindness of Agrotourist Farm “Gościna u Babci” we had the opportunity to photograph the flowers bouquets on their farm and transfer them to the game.
So how exactly paintings from different buildings in real world were transferred to our game?
Firstly we made a lot of photographs using reflex panel, soft box lights (Yes even outside it is needed) tripod and polarizing filter for our camera.
This all is needed to get very flat image with as smooth background as possible. That kind of photography then could be processed to get game ready detail.
Next step was cutting out unnecessary backgrounds from the photography in Photoshop so everything what is not painting is transparent (alpha channel) Then we saved it to .png or .targa file (depending on our needs)
Then We connected all our flower paintings to one texture (In game its called texture atlas and it is used for optimization purposes) Below You could see that atlas. As you noticed it has no transparency visible, this is because Transparency is kept in separate channel, and on color RGB layers we used filter called “Soldify”. It is next thing typical for video games graphics. It protects from leaking border colour when using Mip-Maps. (Sounds very complicated but maybe will explain it in one of our future posts)
Flowers Paintings Texture atlas
Ok… and now what?
Now we have to put that details on our 3d models in game. To do that we are using really great system that you could buy on asset store. It is called Easy Decals.
It gives us possibility to put our details to any 3d object in our game, also it allows us to combine all detail by texture atlas, that means that we could choose what exactly painting we want to use, and connect them all together to bake Precomputed Global Illumination light on it.
It looks Like that:
Choosing between different paintings from texture atlas in Easy Decals.
Edition of decal with Easy decal in Unity , before and after light
In real world, everything is bouncing light back, walls, floors items. In nowadays video Games Realtime Global Illumination means that your pc will simulate that effect, so light will be much more natural and realistic. For example Day Light that go through windows into the room, will bounce from the floor and illuminate the whole interior.
For decal material shader we are using Lux Plus shader decal variation cause it gave us possibility to add to our decals also snow and wetness.
This is how it was done – from the summer travel to the beautiful Zalipie village to flower paintings that you’ll be able to see in our game after successful Kickstarter campaign :)
Final look of flowers paintings in The End of the Sun:
You could also add The End of the Sun to your Wishlist on Steam!
