New this week

This week I completed the art assets for the start room. Since the start room is extremely important, I spent a little more time on the first draft. Alongside this I solved the issue I had with baked lighting by transitioning over to Bakery. I also created some artificial god rays to help with aesthetics.

Tile Art

Overall, I’m fairly happy with how the starting room turned out. It still needs a couple more props to help it out but other than that it’s turned out great. Throughout all this time making art assets it seems the style has shifted further and further from the original wall texture. This guarantees I will need to redo the walls and possible even the floor in the future.

Below is a slideshow of the tile.

New lighting system

Changing from the built-in light baking system to using third party tool has not been painless. I tested 2 of the 5 fancy lighting methods those being SH and Baked Normal Maps. These methods had very different processes and produced vastly different performances. SH was by far the better-looking light baking mode. But barely. This mode was filled with almost overbearing overhead. It increases the build’s file size by at least 10 fold (compared the baked normal maps). Puts a whole lot of stress onto the loading, so much so that I would need to overhaul how the loading system. And creates too many files to push into GitHub if all the rooms baked in one commit. On top of this, it involved converting all my materials to a separate system (which was fairly easy but tedius).

The other light baking system was Baked Normal Maps. Before this whole experiment I had expected this to be the desired lighting method. It required no conversion of materials and just worked.

According to the documentation the main highlight of SH is its approximate specular highlights, which do look good. But not 6gb good. I imagine if my models and materials had been of more realistic quality SH would be more noticeable and cause a comparatively smaller external effect.

One of the significant boosts SH had over Baked Normals is that the Fresnel effect was far better. However, I have tinkered with the skybox material so that baked normal has a softer, less aggressive Fresnel.

So, in the end, I’m going with Baked Normals as my method of light baking. This still causes a noticeable increase in file size, however, not enough to worry about. Also, it seems relatively easy to reduce the file size if it does become an issue in the future.

Particle Effects

I know I was going to need to create a fake god ray. I originally learnt of artificial god rays back when I was learning the hammer editor for source games. In that they had built in props that mimicked light rays. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t even know where to begin making a prop like that, but people apparently do the same thing with particle effects. The particle systems were pretty easy, but I fear they lack the definition those old source props had.

Currently this is good enough, but I may look into the classic style if I feel the aesthetics clash.

What’s next?

It’s finally time to work on the boss. I have a good mental breakdown on its appearance and move set. It will involve learning some new features and testing some unusual stuff that conflicts with inverted kinematics but hopefully it’s not too bad.