Decals

Last week was busy as usual, especially since the deadline approaches fast. The crunch continues, and it’s both exhausting and nice to get a lot of things done. I continued working in the factory level, placing out props that was finished and fixing missing geometry. A lot of them I also textured myself, as we have only one other texture artist and they are painted by hand. I’ve gotten used to the style so I can do them pretty fast, but it does also mean that I get less time to work in the level.

Below are some screenshots from the part of the factory level that got a complete makeover after the alpha testing.

I’ve also finally been doing decals, which lifted the scenery a lot. A decal is a texture on a transparent plane that you can place out on walls, floors, ceilings and the like. In the screenshot above you can see them as cracks and dirt on the wall. Being able to rotate and scale them to any extent (resolution doesn’t quite matter in these cases) they can be extremely useful when you want to give life to an otherwise plain wall, for example. Adding a crack in the wall texture would have created a pattern of cracks over the whole wall, but making decals instead allows me to place them wherever I want.

The last days of the week, we made props for the other level; the city. We first went through the level and made a list of all the props we wanted, and then sat down and made as many as we could. We worked hard and fast, two of my teammates modelled and I textured them, and although there’s still lot to do, I’m confident that we’ll finish them in good time for me to place them in the level as well.