Sunday SoW Update 3

Hax, another poor week, productivity wise. The week itself was busy at work, I'd planned to work hard on SoW over the weekend but...I got Mass Effect 2 on Friday. And, well, I've been quite enjoying it :P Ah well, we're all here because we're enthusiastic about games, right? If you can't give yourself leave to play a good game every now and then, what is the point? ;)

I decided to do a texture pass on the warehouses. The buildings looked too drab and brown, I decided some variety was needed so that the player's eye doesn't simply 'slide off' all that brown.

Some things to remember when creating a model, I've found. It is important to pay attention to the silhouette. You want to avoid it looking too boxy and flat, you want the silhouette to be interesting. Make parts that jut out, avoid absolute symmety, vary the angle of planes relative to other planes. When it comes to textures you want to do something similar, you want to try break up visual repetition, both in texture pattern and colour shades. (I'm not saying I necessary succeed at these things, but I'm working at it. ;) )

The other thing I did with the texture pass was think about the colour scheme. Generally, your scene should have a consistent colour scheme, a palette. Throwing down colours at random doesn't work, and you have to make sure the colours you use work well together. Part of my pass was to adjust the textures to work better together, as well as to break up the brownness of them.

Tiling textures can look very repetitive, visually. A simple trick to help counteract that is to further subdivide a plane. This allows you to alter the texture mapping on the subdivisions in order to counter that repetition. You'll see a better example in a moment, but you can see it here too. I've cut up the wall plane with the wooden plank texture, then rotated the texture mapping 90 degrees in places so the planks run perpendicular to their previous orientation. A little less repetitive looking.


A better example is this new building I did. A bit of photoshop magic and I created that peeling-plaster-over-wood texture there. The problem with creating such a visually distinct pattern on a texture is that it looks [b]horrible[b] if you tile it. But, on the other hand, having distinct texture patterns in places is desirable, you just want to avoid having excessive amounts of unique textures in your scene. So here I sliced up the underlying wall surface along those wooden beams, this allows me to map each rectangle plane between the beams individually. By shifting the texture mapping on the faces around, I can avoid having a lot of visible tiling artifacts. The new peeling-plaster texture, mixed in with the more saturated wood plank texture, is much more pleasing to the eye than the boring old pure-brown scheme, so that was a success.


Another new building variant :


Also did a simple building connector widget, makes walking down an alley between two buildings more visually interesting :


Here is the set so far, you can see the roof tiles are tinged slightly differently for that variation :


With a few more models, you can start to see how it's going to look when I put the district together.