Tech - Week Eleven
Continuing on making decals, this week, I have been working on road markings. Road markings are a surprisingly interesting dilemma. Do you ‘A’ make them part of your road texture and make multiple road textures or ‘B’ make them as decals but then have to render each marking separately. Given that we are producing an Environment pack and want to give the user as much freedom of use as possible ‘B’ seemed the more logical option. Which then lead to well… how should I go about doing this in the most efficient way possible and to get the best visuals but keep the cost of use down to a minimum. Although road markings bring that added detail to the environment that brings it to life and makes it more believable, they aren’t essential so they need to be as cost free to add as possible.
For the most part adding road markings like arrows, text, misc. signs I was able to utilise the same blueprint I made for the graffiti. That was just a case of making a texture and finding the optimal settings to give the required result. But I didn’t want to have to try and line up a series of projected decals along a road just to put lines down. I looked back towards the spline tool I have previously made and realised that I can use the bulk of that to do the job for me.
I stripped back the tool to the essential elements that I needed for this specific job, and rebuilt it to suit. I soon found out that it wasn’t going to be feasible to use deferred decals placed along a spline, so instead I resorted to using meshes instead. This also meant the road markings would have a 3D element to them, something they wouldn’t have if they were just textured on the road. Combining from the graffiti decal material and the spline tool I was able to make a tool that did what we need it to do specifically for this job. Here’s a video showing the features of said tool:
This week coming I’m going to be moving forward to another visual element of the project that we haven’t yet touched. Particle effects are key to any environment when wanting to bring it to life. They are even more important when you don’t have any AI or animated elements on screen as well. No matter how fast or slow life is movement and I’m going be creating a set of visual effects that can be used alongside the other parts of the Environment pack to bring any environment to life with next to no effort.
Given the project is based around slums and from the research we carried out at the start of the project, looking at existing media and real life examples of slums, we have decided that the main effects we want to include is: fire, water splashes, and leaking water, as well as hopefully having smoke and flying carrier bags/ newspapers if time allows.
