Hi fellow shepherds on the search for glory! Welcome to another HIRT Art Update!
After starting the day hunting a seldom occurring bug, we returned to one of our current focus topics: Making the levels and environments of HIRT more polished and “believable”. For this, we are currently building various assets, so we can build new maps quicker and experiment more with the level design and placement of props.
Destroying some arches
We started out by blocking out the simple shapes and correctly UV unwrapping the first arch and pillar. Afterwards, versions of the asset were created by duplicating the first object. We used the bisect tool in blender to make the arches and pillars seem worn down. This method easily helps you created chopped off corners or entire missing pieces. As we want the HIRT maps to emulate ruins of church-like constructions, making the assets seem destroyed was really important in the process. By creating several versions of the “same” asset, we can assure that different use cases are taken care of and the same piece can be used over one map without creating repetitive patterns.
Special UV-maps
All the different versions of the arches and pillars were UV-unwrapped in a way that the meshes can share one UV space. This is important, because we can use one material for all the assets on a HIRT map, which reduces the performance impact. Furthermore, this also helps to be quicker in designing the looks of a map, because color schemes and other shader settings do not need to be adapted all over the place, but on one single material.
High Poly, Low Poly and Baking
The next step for this part of the project is to create High Polygon Count versions of the assets. Those detailed meshes are going to provide normal information for the Low Poly in-game versions, which we more or less modeled today. By baking the normal information of the High Poly versions on to a normal map, these details can be integrated into our game and fed into our very own shader. We are surely gonna write another HIRT Art Update on this process once we will have successfully finished it.
Do you have a question about our process or feel like chatting with the devs of HIRT? Come say hi on our discord!
