This week i’ve mainly focused on getting the map as done as possible, as well as taking a first look at particle effects. We weren’t at all happy with how our map looked and so i decided to take on the trees and create a few variations on them. We soon came to realize that we had to break up the dark pineforest with some leaftrees and different colors. The ground on our map was rather boring as well so i decided to sit down and create some alpha grass, some new ground textures, bushes etc. In other terms a lot of decorations, something that -realy- helped with creating the desired mood of our map.
We wanted new paths that skittered across our map, not just muddy roads and so we decided to create something like big roads with huge stone slabs. I sat down to create a texture that we could paint out on our terrain. I started out by using the lasso tool to create the shapes i wanted to stones to look like. When i was satisfied i filled them with colors, used the layer options inner shadow and Bevel & emboss to give them depth and a kind of 3D look. Bevel & Emboss in particular is a reaaaly powerful tool if you learn how to use it properly i’ve come to understand. With another layer set to Bevel & emboss on top of these base stone slabs i made hem look filthy and worn, it turned out like this;
This did a lot for our map, unfortunately i can’t show you how it looks in unity since i only work with components and don’t even have the whole map on my computer. Wasn’t ment to be like that but yeah, that’s how it’s turned out.
I worked on some new grass aswell, i used an AO pass that Christian baked for me, a lot of copies of the AO layer and some Bevel & Emboss to get the right effect i was looking for. It turned out like this;
I feel like i could’ve done more with the grass but time wasn’t on my side and i really had to move on so i forced myself to be satisfied with this.
I kept going in the same manner with bevel & emboss, inner shadow and a lot of other layer effects to create almost every texture for the environmental texture in our game. Next up was the alpha grass that we mounted on planes and placed around the feet of the trees just to break things up a bit.
I did a few more textures but they’re all in the same manner and with the same method so i’ll save them for another post or for when you get to see them in game. Next up was particle effects, i figured a good place to start was with a simple campfire that we’ll have placed around the map to create some more mood but also to indicate where our capture nodes are. I followed a tutorial on creating a fire, when the tutorial was through i simply added a point light inside of it so that it would cast some light on nearby trees,stones etc. This is what it looked like inside the engine;
After this was done i started looking at feedback for our melee attacks and a friend found a good effect that o could use called trail renderer. That basically renders a trail after whatever you have attatched it though, in my case a weapon. So i’ve been experimenting a lot with size and delay on how long it will linger in the air behind the weapon before it dissipates. It turned out like this;
Today we tried it out with our bossmob called “Mr.Snappy” and it looked really good with his animations so we’re all happy. I Simply changed the color of this effect and we’ll reuse it for the other melee attacks in our game (Melee creep, our champion copperman etc.)
These are the major things i’ve done this week, part from that i’ve been working on trees, an indicator to show the area of effect where melee attacks will deal damage.
Over and out, Henrik Rosenborg.
Henrik Rosenborg 