Critique > 2D & 3D
Wing Commander Pixel Art-y Unity Remake
Kich:
This is looking great. :o
--- Quote from: Howard Day on July 03, 2019, 09:08:24 pm ---Thanks, pistachio! The UI and cockpit...are renders. No painting. I directly save images from 3DSMax to Unity. I fiured out how to do index painting in max, and I love the poop outta it. Here's a glimpse at a straight from MAX 3D render of the main menu:
--- End quote ---
I'd love to hear how you did that rendering on 3DSMax.
Howard Day:
Sure! I'll even share the MAX file. :D So, the basics are: Build a mesh, duplicate that mesh, push it out a bit, turn it inside out, and make it slightly darker than the original.
Then for the materials, you should grab this plugin - http://www.ddag.org/products.html F-Edge. It provides really nicely controlled edge smoothing in scanline 3dsmax.
So the basic workflow for the materials is to use a mapped Gradient ramp using a bitmap gradient.
I've actually got it a bit wrong here - for the gradient to ramp correctly, the bright side should be on the right, not left - but since I'm lazy, I just added an inverting output node to fix it.
So here's what the controlling composite map, under that output node looks like!
Layer 1 is a simple gradient that's mapped using UVs on the text - it goes bottom to top, and front to back on the text model. The second is the highlight edge 0 it uses the f-edge material to call out the hard edges of the text with bright corners, and then is masked by an angle blend to only appear on the bottom of the text. The top is the dither - it's a 1-1 screen-mapped texture that is just a tiled classic dithering pattern. This is blended in very gently at 10%.
There you go! That's basically how I made these:
and as promised, here's the max file, with everything you need in 2015 format!
http://www.hedfiles.net/StartDemo.zip
Enjoy!
Vinik:
Amazing tutorial, thank you Howard :y:
--- Quote from: Howard Day on July 15, 2019, 04:34:48 pm --- So, the basics are: Build a mesh, duplicate that mesh, push it out a bit, turn it inside out, and make it slightly darker than the original.
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I have been using this as a way to have cheap outlines on meshes, interesting that it can be also be used in renderings with this level of quality.
I am not a fan of dithering in general, except when it implies texture, but here it does help selling the pixel-art-ish style of the renders.
Are all materials such as the green painted metal and the rest of the cockpit being rendered with gradient ramps as well? I was under the impression that the color ramps were caused by a LUT posterization on the whole screen, rather than a mapped gradients per material. I wonder if the rote would be too different to achieve something similar to your results in blender.
Howard Day:
Yeah - I agree that too much dithering is...problematic. I try and keep it subtle - just enough to look like someone polished their pixel art a bit. And yep - all the materials are gradient ramps. The LUT posterization on the final product just enforces the 236 color limit - but most of the colors are already in that range save for some little fringes of AA here and there.
I'd be excited to see what you come up with out of Blender!
Here's the new added Salthi, both in turnaround and in action!
Also showing off how well those damage effects work!
Enjoy!
Howard Day:
I'm pretty close to pushing out a new update to the demo - A major update, in fact.
And I['m starting to think about the Dralthi cockpit. That'll be the first playable version - where you can pick a side to have combat with.
Here's a glimpse of the Dralthi IV cockpit I did a while ago.
Enjoy!
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