Now that we are all back into the swing of things, it has been much easier to get some work done. So this week, I have quite a lot to share. Lets begin.
First, I got back to work on the floorboard textures I had been making. Following a tutorial I learned substance designer for the project. While the tutorial unfortunately only focused on a high detail realistic substance, I was able to simplify it down to a more stylized texture to match the game. Overall the substance was broken down into three pieces. First being the wood grain pattern, second being the planks pattern, and the third blending the two together.
The first variation of this had smaller planks and lighter colors. However after some input from the team I made a second version.
This second version had darker more crimson colors to match our environment better, and the planks themselves were larger for better visibility.
Following this, I started working a bit on the 3d environment concepts for our levels. Since the floor models would remain as they were with the addition of the texture, I started concepting the wall types. Since the game takes place on a ship, I wanted to reflect that in the walls. The goal being to mimic the curve of the hull that you would expect. However, this created the problem of interior walls. So, I settled on having two wall types. One for the sides which would be at the outer bounds of each level, and one to fill in the central gaps.
I quickly found that the hull walls were easy. matching that style was very simple, and needed little extra work. The Central walls however needed more time. These were a few of the better concepts I made inspired by Nordic architecture. While these designs need more work, they give me a good jumping off point to find a nice balance of practical and pretty.
While working on these walls, I came to the realization that the high poly versions would likely incorporate the usual ornate Viking designs seen on just about everything they made. And not wanting to model those by hand, I dug into geometry nodes for the first time. It took a bit, but after following a tutorial I produced this.
After finishing the tutorial, I went through and labeled each of the nodes to understand what they did. This gave me a good foundation moving forward to start looking at creating these Nordic designs.
The first design took a little while to make, and some help from my teacher. I used a path to create the design, the extruded geometry along it. Unfortunately this particular design could not repeat, and much of it was done by hand anyways. Not to mention as seen above, it took quite a few nodes to make.
This second design was far easier to make, though I did still require help, and was able to procedurally generate on set parameters. This way I could extend the length of the pattern, and the scale of the segments. I have been working on a way to round of the ends so the pattern folds back into itself like most Nordic designs do, but it is not working quite yet. The nodes for this can be seen disconnected in the second image.
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