Creating the right environment
The world of REPLACED consists of hundreds and thousands of meticulously detailed props. Trash on the streets, old dumpsters, phone booths, lamps, post boxes, cars, retro computers — you name it... I think we got it… somewhere.
With this level of detail and amount of stuff to create we had to come up with a consistent workflow for creating environment assets that are highly stylized and read as pixel-art, yet imitate physical properties of real materials to fully take advantage of real-time lights and shadows.
We have been experimenting a lot going about how we can retain the definite pixel-art flavor while doing detailed 3D props. The answer was a tough pill to swallow though: we have to do everything by hand. Every single prop, every single diffuse texture, every additional map and, of course, the models themselves.
Additional maps? Damn boi, a lot of 'em. Even though it seems that it's simple: just put pixel art on a mesh and that's it you dumbass...
Tried that too, but to achieve a modern look that plays well with lighting, post effects and dynamic placement your props should behave modernly too:
"What if the player moves that crate under a lamp post?"
"What if a searchlight goes through that window?"
"What if ... you just want to reuse the prop in other lighting conditions and save yourself a sleepless night creating another vending machine again"
To allow all those cases to look natural and beautiful we basically need to draw every prop a couple of times:
Diffuse
Specular Color
Glossiness
Normal Map
Alpha
All those things create a kind of asset that takes full advantage of the game's world while undoubtedly pixel-art in presentation.
With the help of our Rendering Engineer we created custom shaders that are tailored specifically for what we are building, we have developed guidelines for all the material types, seasoning and color palettes.
Even though it's a massive undertaking to make that many textures by hand -- we hope the result will be 100% worth it.
Stay tuned for more development blogs!
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