Kickstarter Update 15: The Environment – Part 1
11/11 - 2015
Hello and welcome to our fifteenth Kickstarter update!
The Environment – Part 1
Welcome to the fifteenth Kickstarter update for War of Rights! We're very happy to report that
Veterans Day has been very good for the campaign since we're now 98% funded with 3 days to go!
We can't wait for this to catch (Exception) { } finally be funded so that we can work on our development schedule for
the game in order to have the Closed Alpha build ready within the next 6 months.
Now, let's get started with today's update!
The Environment – Part 1
Hi! I’m Emil Alexander Hansen, also known as Fancy Sweetroll. I studied art and computer graphics at 3D College in Denmark.
I am the creator of all the vegetation assets and I make sure the environment and the lighting looks as best as it possibly can.
Generally when I go for a walk, I either walk with my head pointed down towards the ground or up to the sky,
trying to see and understand why the real world is being lit the way it is. The goal of this is to replicate it as closely as possible in War of Rights.
Creating grass for War of Rights
In War of Rights, grass is created by modelling each blade of grass as a 3D model in a 3D modeling program such as 3Ds Max.
Having each blade of grass as an actual 3D model in any game engine would simply put too much pressure on the limits of the current generation of hardware, killing the framerate.
But the grass as a 3D model does allow us to bake out various textures such as the diffuse,
alpha and normal maps. The normal map contains the three dimensional shape of the original 3D modeled blades of grass,
allowing the game engine to shade the grass differently depending on the direction of the light source while putting very little stress on the hardware.
These textures can then be applied onto an optimized lowpoly mesh called a grass patch which is then distributed across the grassy parts of the terrain.
You may have noticed on the diffuse texture that there are a lot of different sections of grass with varying colors.
This allows us to create a lot of color variation on the grass fields themselves with nice gradients flowing into each other,
making the grass look really soft and real.
Another cool thing is how we blend the grass with the terrain.
Usually each plane of grass near the bottom just cuts a straight line through the terrain,
making it very easy to spot each individual polygon of grass.
In War of Rights, each blade of grass starts at a different height on the texture.
What this does is that it gives each polygon of grass a really big depth to it so when you look at it,
it really gives you that 3D effect with a lot of depth.
We hope you liked today's update. We look forward to bringing you more information about the development of War of Rights,
and we can't wait to continue working on this project so that we can make the game the best it can be!