It's been an unusual week. My WIP post in one game engine forum regarding my upcoming dungeon kit was met with a mix of both anticipation and troll flame. I think the trolls successfully trashed the thread for everyone. A forum moderator even insisted that I was posting work by another artist. Which is just straight crap! Just looking at the screen shots you can tell it is plainly not the same textures or models. I contacted the "other" artist and discovered that he also created a Dungeon Kit about 4 years ago. While explaining to him the inspiration for my work, it's features, and how it was unique, I realized that maybe my project was perhaps poorly named.
What I am creating is really a game developer kit containing the graphic assets for one or more sprawling labyrinth(s) of rooms, passages, and stairs - Some of which may be used used as a traditional "dungeon", but it is really more expansive than a medieval type of prison. Of course the developer using the set could create a level with very few rooms to make a classic dungeon, but they could also create something on the scale of Tolkien's Mines of Moria, which became known as a "dungeon" in the D&D sense.
Some of the design features I've worked into the set are a door coupling system to allow some forgiveness when positioning the rooms. It gives a little more margin for error. The components of the set are grid based, normal components are 1-4 squares in length and or width and 1 or 2 squares high.
The kit is being produced to allow export to MAP format, which means curves are not an easy thing. So geometry wise, it's not very organic and may look a bit dated. I also don't currently have the means to attach normal maps to my exports in non obj format. So what I had to do was bake the texture in ZBrush, and then tack that 2d baked texture onto the models. I think it came out looking pretty good considering, but it doesn't have the nice shader 3d effect of true normals. On the positive side, you can use them in engines without advance shader support.
I've done a lot of work on the project this week, adding a more finalized texture set and about 20 more components.
Click the pic to zoom in!
4 comments:
Looks pretty good - you have some texture positioning / repetition issues still, but it looks promising.
I'm interested in seeing how this works. I'm desperately in need of dungeons, as you know.
I'm not sure I'm going to do much more on the texture repetition. I want to tighten up the ceiling texture as it has an obvious band. The wall textures I'm not able to do much else with without causing visible distortion. They do look pretty nice with the light maps on them, I'll post some shots of that next week. But the repetition is not as noticeable with them light mapped. However, getting my light maps into TGE is a dodgy issue, so I might leave the DIF format version without lights.
I will be going through and tightening up the UVs.
Maybe you can test a pack for me?
Sure, I'll see what I can do. You have my email.
I need to get a month where Rampant Games comes out ahead enough so that I can spend some time shopping at your store!
Generally we provide a free pack to a couple of folks who are willing to test them for us. I'll shoot you an email once I have the whole thing together. I'll probably include about 20 pages of docs with it too. It looks like there is going to be a lot in it.
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