Asset Creation: Off the Map

It’s time to finally get our teeth into this project and start making assets. As I have been pushing the first person canal bit of our game I am going to be responsible for creating the assets for this area.

I decided to start with grass, and generally making some flowers. I decided to go with a field of Poppies and Daisies. I made shore to pick plants that could grow together, also judging by the amount of ref available for fields of Poppies and Daisies they are also a favourite.

I made my Grass and flowers by creating high poly versions of every individual part I would need, so pettles, grass, bulbs, stalks Etc. I then Projection mapped the normal information and Albedo information onto a single plain. I could then put this texture map on to a Square plain, and cut the individual pieces out and then re build the flowers from these extremely low poly pieces.

Allot of the high poly meshes were textured using Gradients in 3DS-Max and colour picking from my ref.  The leaves and poppy petals were individually modelled, unwrapped and textured prior to then being projection mapped.  This is the process I used to make the vast majority of the foliage.

This process once you have learnt it is extremely efficient. It’s also really quite fun as it’s in complete contrast with the normal modelling process. Using this method you are first modelling with only creating a projection map as your finale output. This means you don’t have to worry about tri counts and generally inefficient modelling techniques, this makes a nice change. This is all going toward making your texture, so you’re actually making your texture first and then you’re creating your 3D assets. This is reverse to the normal process, also often with this process there is need for unwrapping.

First version of the grass

Here I also had to learn about the asset painting tools in Unreal.

After creating this I could see that each individual alpha I had created was too dense. I need to create grass that doesn’t have a defined edge; it should just become lost in amongst the rest of the grass. This is the main challenge with creating foliage, its hiding the fact that these assets are made up of relatively large alpha planes. These assets will also take up a huge proportion of the screen and can be looked at from most angles. I’ve still got allot of experimenting to do here with this grass.

I’ve added my flowers and created various different types of grass. First an FBX that consists of just grass, another of just grass and daisies, Grass and Poppies and finally grass daisies and poppies.  This means that I can now make a varied field of foliage instead of a field with the same consistency throughout.