Tech - Week Sixteen
Continuing on from last week’s work on the ocean shader I have used the combined height maps, not only for displacement and normal map generation but now, to create the masks to set where the foam on the peaks of the waves should be. This addition with the contrast between the water and the foam has added to the definition of the waves and visually increased their depth.
As well as having the foam at the peaks of the waves I wanted to add it so that we can control where it is. So that if there is any objects sticking out of the water the artist would be able to add foam where the water collides with the object. To this I have added the ability to vertex paint the foam onto the water plane, with the control of how much/ strong the foam being in the brush settings.
The way the previous version of the ‘Random Asset Location’ tool works is that it places assets randomly within set area. That’s all well and good but it isn’t very smart about how it does that, and also isn’t very indicative of how clutter and random things accumulate in the real- world.
Instead I have started work on a newer version of said tool that places assets in the corner between the walls and floor, spreading outwards mimicking a more realistic way in which items group together and spread out.
The ideal goal would be for the user to be able to draw a volume and it would find where the corners are itself, but given the time restraints left on the project I am going to first get it working so that it will spread out from a corner and take it from there.
The first thing was to work out how I was going give the user control over where the placement would take place. I figured doing line traces perpendicular to a spline would give me the location of where the walls are and would also give the user enough control over the tool as they can place and direct the traces to where they want the items to be placed.
As I’ve then got the location of the wall it was a case of using some vector maths to work out where the objects would be placed in relation to the wall and the spline. With the use of a curve I was able to mimic the spread of assets that I was hoping to achieve.
The objects unfortunately overlap both the wall and each other at the moment and are unable to be moved after they have been placed without completely changing their arrangement. This is something that I am going to looking into in the weeks to come while working on this tool. As well as that I am going be making sure that it is a quick and easy to use as possible, with as few bugs and glitches as possible, as I am currently getting some this regards to using multiple meshes and certain mesh placement.
