BGP – Day 19.1
Vertex Painting and TessellationThe sun is shining and springs is here, what better than to spend your time sitting inside, learning about materials and tessellation? At least that is what I did. I wanted to look into that, since our Lead Artist asked me if I knew how to use it, I didn’t, but now I do! Also another thing was mentioned when the programmers had their QA with their teacher. The teacher was worried that we wouldn’t get all the details into the 3D art and that It could be to much work for us, as an example he mentioned being able to add sand into our environment. Since the game is played inside an old pyramid, it is very likely that the floor have accumulated some sand. Therefor I wanted to know how we could do this in an easy way. First off I created a brick material using some tillable textures I bought some time ago, this can be easily switched into sandstone or something that will fit the Egyptian theme better, so it’s just a placeholder. Then I added some other materials into it the brick material, which was dirt and moss. The idea was that I wanted to be able to paint a completely new material on top of the bricks and not only one material but two. This would mean that our artist then can switch between the different channels and draw different materials as they please. This is what the material looks like with all the nodes:
I also created different parameters for the different textures within the material, these parameters (or values) can then easily be changed if a instance (which is like a copy, but all changes you do to the copy doesn’t change the original) of the material is created. This is what it all looks like when the values are changed within the material instance.
Click the title of the video to watch it on Youtube for better quality! In the video above you get to see how the tessellation looks like I also show you some textures that are listed under the group name of ”Paint”, these are the textures that can be painted on top of the brick material, but they can also be changed in the menu showed above, so that other artist can easily switch materials without worrying about looking through the chaos of nodes shown in the first picture above. Here is what it looks like when painting the materials dirt & moss: Click the title of the video to watch it on Youtube for better quality! As you can see in the video, when I switch between the two channels Red and Green I change the material that I’m painting with. Also the material that is painted has a mask which helps the material prioritize the cracks between the bricks, making it look more realistic. That was all for today, take care!  |
