88 replies to this topic

[Kablammo11]

That's good advice, WKD and good luck with your Madiba Memorial GC, Soweto, Gauteng Province, Republic of South Africa...  

There are some decent finds to be made now and then on the Unity asset store - just sort the content by price to find them more quickly. There's also Turbosquid, where you can dl some free stuff if you register.

[olazaboll]

Ok ... I just manage to import a 3d object from the asset store into Unity wich was a pretty simple task and cool at the same time.

 

I also found some lighthouses in the store and wonder what is the definition of a "close"  

Lets say your green is 40 yds from the light house , and that is were you are standing and looking at the L.H... would that be considered as a close up or not ??

 

Here are the "specs" of to lighthouses:

 

Object 1:

 

"Textures are very detailed so it makes this model good enough for close-ups. 

Features: 
- 2048x2048 diffuse.
- 1045 Triangles, 571 Polygons, 803 Vertices .
- Model is one mesh. 
- Model completely unwrapped. 
- Model is fully textured with all materials applied.
- Model scaled to approximate real world size. 
- All nodes, materials and textures are "

 

Object 2:

 

"Lighthouse with rotating light on a cliff

The lighthouse model is 5.500 tris and the cliff is 3.600tris. The cliff is mostly for showcasing but it's included in the package.

I would not recommend using the model for close-up display like in a FPS shooter since the building is using a unique texture (low res). But it would be great for an RTS game or as a prop in the distance.

The Volume light in the tower is not included, it's a lightbeam package available in the Asset Store. The model is rendered using the free version of Unity with lightmaps. "

 

- Also ... about the lightbeam in object 2  ... would that be something that would work in PG ?

[Kablammo11]

Okay, Ola - my  answers are not authoritative in any way, but I can't resist...

 

The designer warns that the texture resolution is low: That means when you move your viewer too close to the lighthouse, the surface of it becomes blocky and pixelated. If that happens, you are too close and the illusion of a lighthouse is being destroyed.

In a FPS, a first-person-shooter, the player would move very close to it, maybe even try to climb up, and being that close (almost kissing-distance) would not work. 40 meters away on a golf course would probably work - If you intend for your lighthouse to be a background feature, that should be good enough. But since we will be able to move freely in PG, some players might want to play a ball at the lighthouse, just for fun, or walk over to it and check it out.

Basically, you can judge the close-up usefulness of your imported objects yourself, in Unity, by moving your view close to them - and checking if they still look good or if they start to fall apart visually. In the end, it's your judgment call that will decide if it works or not. 

If in doubt, try posting a screen cap. 

 

Congratulations! You have just entered the marvelous universe of texturing. Oh, many delicately devious, dispiriting despairs await you there! (And one d-alliteration from me).  

 

About the light beam? Of course it would work. For the lightbeam to show in clear computer daylight, though, there would need to be some mist. Also, you probably will have to animate the rotation. I have not progressed far enough myself to be of any help with this.

[olazaboll]

Thx K11 

The course I have planned includes a lighthouse , but also a "near town" experience ... so there will be streetlights avbl as well

If you play the course at dusk maybe lights can be used

[Kablammo11]

That sounds like a very ambitious project. While you're at it, try and add a Aurora Borealis (Polasrken)...  

[AndyJumbo]

Hey Gents, you are talking about very interesting things on Texture, i appreciate to read those stuff and something was new for me,
i thank you guys, that's very good!

>The goal is the playable of the game<

[Kablammo11]

Always glad to be of service, Andy.

 

End of year treat coming right up. (That's actually the long version of my answer to Olazabol's lowres post. Here's a brief overview of some very basic key features of 3D objects. More seasoned readers, please look away, this is very, laughably, painfully basic.

 

Every 3D object is defined by two distinct components that combine with each other: By its mesh and by its texture.

 

The MESH defines the geometry of an object, its shape. Think of it as a grid in three dimensions, made out of vertexes (points in 3D space), and lines, connecting the vertexes. 

The mesh is the spacial model of an object. It is also called a wireframe, sometimes.

 

 

When the vertices and lines of a wireframe enclose a flat, 2D space, this space is called a polygon. This basic polygon is like a blank wall tile at the moment. And that's all for the mesh, really: Vertexes and lines define polygons which in return add up to a 3D shape. A rather boringly colored, unnatural-looking shape...

 

 

Now the TEXTURE comes into play. The texture basically is a 2D image that is being wrapped over the 3D mesh. Think of a strip of wallpaper that you need to paste onto a blank, round, curved wall of polygons(electronically).

But there is a problem: The computer doesn't know which bit of the texture goes on which bit of the wireframe….

So will need to tell him that - how depends on the software that is involved - assign the texture to a mesh, choose from different spacial projections like spherical, radial, cylindrical etc and generally have to fiddle a bit and fuss about to stick your flat, 2D texture image to a spacial object.

 

 

Once you've done that, you're not done yet. The texture still looks flattish, bland and rather fake. Even on the 3D object, it looks a bit too much 2D. It could work okay, mind you, from a distance. But up close it needs a bit more oomph  So you might want to add a second layer to your texture, a second 2D image which gets filtered on top of the base texture. Like a bump map (Unity calls it a normal map), an extra layer that works like a height map, assigning high and low spots to your texture. If you do that, the result starts looking a bit more realistic.

 

 

And there is so much more you could do with textures: Extra layers with various effects, extra shaders (special effects helpers) that could add fur or hair, crazy stuff, advanced stuff, complicated and sophisticated stuff we'd rather not bother with. I'm clueless about most of it...

 

 

 

To stay basic: I recently built this Alpine Clubhouse, from scratch, with self-made textures:

Here are the two images I used a while ago to texturize it. I called them "Polytext", because I assembled, into one file, all the materials needed for stone walls, roof tiles, wall planks, windows and doors. Just look at the links, you'll understand.

Polytexture (click to see)

Polytexture Bump (click to see)

The result did turn out okay, I went a bit heavy on the bumpiness of my bump map, but I can adjust the bumpiness within Unity, so no harm done.

 

 

 

Well, my life just got one hour shorter, doing this. Hope you can take something out of it.

Happy New Year Everybody!

[olazaboll]

Just to be specific : I didnt build a 3D object ... I just downloaded one and planted it into to a project ... took minus 2 minutes ,,,,

[Kablammo11]

I know, Ola. Even so, I figured you (or Andy, or anybody who wants to…) might require some basic understanding of what objects are made of and how their elements interact, no matter where you have them from. 

I'm not trying to lure you or anybody into object designing, even though I fear that freeware downloads will not suffice in the long run (doesn't for me, it's never quite the right thing I have in mind), no I'm obviously just abusing your little question for a strange mixture of utterly trivial information combined with shameless self-promotion.  

[Keith]

Always glad to be of service, Andy.

 

End of year treat coming right up. (That's actually the long version of my answer to Olazabol's lowres post. Here's a brief overview of some very basic key features of 3D objects. More seasoned readers, please look away, this is very, laughably, painfully basic.

 

Every 3D object is defined by two distinct components that combine with each other: By its mesh and by its texture.

 

The MESH defines the geometry of an object, its shape. Think of it as a grid in three dimensions, made out of vertexes (points in 3D space), and lines, connecting the vertexes. 

The mesh is the spacial model of an object. It is also called a wireframe, sometimes.

 

 

When the vertices and lines of a wireframe enclose a flat, 2D space, this space is called a polygon. This basic polygon is like a blank wall tile at the moment. And that's all for the mesh, really: Vertexes and lines define polygons which in return add up to a 3D shape. A rather boringly colored, unnatural-looking shape...

 

 

Now the TEXTURE comes into play. The texture basically is a 2D image that is being wrapped over the 3D mesh. Think of a strip of wallpaper that you need to paste onto a blank, round, curved wall of polygons(electronically).

But there is a problem: The computer doesn't know which bit of the texture goes on which bit of the wireframe….

So will need to tell him that - how depends on the software that is involved - assign the texture to a mesh, choose from different spacial projections like spherical, radial, cylindrical etc and generally have to fiddle a bit and fuss about to stick your flat, 2D texture image to a spacial object.

 

 

Once you've done that, you're not done yet. The texture still looks flattish, bland and rather fake. Even on the 3D object, it looks a bit too much 2D. It could work okay, mind you, from a distance. But up close it needs a bit more oomph  So you might want to add a second layer to your texture, a second 2D image which gets filtered on top of the base texture. Like a bump map (Unity calls it a normal map), an extra layer that works like a height map, assigning high and low spots to your texture. If you do that, the result starts looking a bit more realistic.

 

 

And there is so much more you could do with textures: Extra layers with various effects, extra shaders (special effects helpers) that could add fur or hair, crazy stuff, advanced stuff, complicated and sophisticated stuff we'd rather not bother with. I'm clueless about most of it...

 

 

 

To stay basic: I recently built this Alpine Clubhouse, from scratch, with self-made textures:

Here are the two images I used a while ago to texturize it. I called them "Polytext", because I assembled, into one file, all the materials needed for stone walls, roof tiles, wall planks, windows and doors. Just look at the links, you'll understand.

Polytexture (click to see)

Polytexture Bump (click to see)

The result did turn out okay, I went a bit heavy on the bumpiness of my bump map, but I can adjust the bumpiness within Unity, so no harm done.

 

 

 

Well, my life just got one hour shorter, doing this. Hope you can take something out of it.

Happy New Year Everybody!

That looks excellent to my eyes.  You could probably make a sweet rustic style club house with those materials.  I am getting pretty handy with the terrain tools, but structures really kick my butt.  I installed Blender and just haven't gotten very far with it.  I may just have to throw myself at the mercy of whatever structures are made available to us.

[Kablammo11]

That looks excellent to my eyes.  You could probably make a sweet rustic style club house with those materials.  I am getting pretty handy with the terrain tools, but structures really kick my butt.  I installed Blender and just haven't gotten very far with it.  I may just have to throw myself at the mercy of whatever structures are made available to us.

 

Yep, this modelling thing quickly degenerates into work… There's no quick and easy way to get what you want. So you might as well want what you can get...

[golfhuone]

So, my home course has some specific bark covering in some waste areas. I can take image of this and then import it to Unity and start painting my ground with it?

[shimonko]

That'll work but it won't look very good.

You first need to make it a tileable texture so when the texture is repeated, no joins will be noticed. It's an easy thing to do with Photoshop and I assume there'll be lots of tutorials out there showing how to do it.

You will still see repetition though. There are a few ways to minimize that but you have to look at shooting a large enough area while still retaining enough detail in the bark. Take multiple shots, rotate some, stitch them together to make a larger texture, paint in Unity with multiple textures at different opacities,... it's a bit of trial and error as typically you don't won't every texture to be at the maximum resolution for the sake of performance.

Creating a normal map is trickier but you'll get ok results with a straight bump map like K11 did above. Unity uses normal maps rather than bump maps--the difference is normal maps bounce light off the bumps as though the bumps were actually modeled, whereas bump maps bounce the light back off the underlying geometry, ignoring the bumps, so they don't look as good when viewing them while moving. Normal maps are color (typically bluish), bump maps are grayscale. Unity will allow bump maps to be used, converting them to normal maps, but not too well (I suspect K11's problem above with too much bumpiness).

Best not think too much about bump (and especially) normal maps until you're creating seamless (i.e. tileable) textures at a good size so they look good when repeated.

[Kablammo11]

Shinmonko's answer is correct, golfhunone. Texturing can be quite a female canine...

Unity having the capability to make two or more textures overlay each other and using different brush shapes, you might want try to use a punctualized soft brush and gently apply your bark texture over another ground texture at 50%.

I'm not saying it'll work, but it's worth a shot. 

Another option would be decals. They are like bumper stickers that you can stick onto a surface, single design bits over a transparent background. For instance, if you want to place divots on the tee area or on the fairway, or a cluster of fallen leaves underneath a tree or bush, you'd best do that by creating and applying a decal.

 

Normal maps are a very interesting option. They would basically allow you to do to the terrain what I did further above with my bump map: Add a little bit of uneven action and spacial texturing to the otherwise too smooth, flat texture image. It's definitely worth looking into, but I don't know what this would do to the CourseForge textures of green, fairways and rough, because this would need to be done via the terrain material. It's on my to-do list once the Forge comes out.

Also, I don't know if normal maps would negatively affect processing speed. 

[shimonko]

Normal maps are actually faster because they're already in the form the renderer needs for light calculations. Bump maps have to be converted to normal maps. Bump maps simply are a third the size on disk and easier to make and visualize (hence their popularity) and for many objects the difference is hard to notice.

In Unity, you may have noticed when creating a diffuse bump material that the bump map was converted to a bluish looking normal map.

[golfhuone]

I found this: http://www.shawn-odo...m/textures.html, there is just right bark texture. And may be other useable too...

[Kablammo11]

Nice ones, golfhuone. Looks like you will need to make the tile size some 1by1 meters to get the scaling about right. But if you tile this over larger areas, some pattern repetition will occur, almost certainly, which will give away the tiles even if their seams match perfectly. It mostly does that for me, may you fare better. Go ahead and try them out.

 

@shinmonko. Yes I noticed the blueish thing, Unity always asks me if I want to convert my bumps into normals. I obediently say yes. I used the term "bump map" because that's what they basically are. 

[golfhuone]

Well, I am just beginner. But have been working as graphic designer, quitted since. Don't know anything about creating courses or using Unity so far. But I will learn.

I could plant some random weeds all around that bark. Like we have.

Does anyone know where to download terrain importer? Anyone want to share because id like to start practicing?

[Kablammo11]

My understanding is that you can't download the terrain importer… yet. It will be made available at the same time as the CourseForge. 

[golfhuone]

I thought it was available some time ago? If so, please someone upload it somewhere