3DForge Exteriors

Cobus gave me this link. He uses this and it looks great: http://shadermap.com/home/

And not at all expensive.

 

I never knew that normal from models produce better results. Thanks for the info.

I recently downloaded a package called Awesomebump. I think it started off as a gimp plugin but it can run standalone. Seems pretty good but have not tested it fully yet.

Edit - it seems to be free as well. Worth checking the licence though.

 

@docsavage
I will not release another asset pack without normals
It makes such a huge difference props & environments

HAHA, BIG typo there Sorry

 

I didn't realise it could make that much of a difference. Do you mean in time taken to produce?

 

@docsavage Depending on how you do it, it could be fast or if sculpted, it can be slower.
But the huge looks difference, the fact that the textures, roughness and so many other features "COMES TO LIFE" makes it stupid to not add. It is not just flat polygons with colour on top anymore.

Glad that you like it so much as well.
The recent HD Village Interiors Kit update has been very well received and makes the package so much nicer

Cheers
Cobus

 

Ah sorry. Misunderstood you. From your post I thought you meant you would not make normal maps in future.

Cheers

 

possible typo

 

I don't think there's any 'possible' about it. I think when he went to find the letters o, u and t, Cobus' fingers must have frozen

@S4G4N lol

 

well! I hope the upcoming thatch is of better quality than the typing...


XD XD XD

 

@docsavage @smada luap @Whippets
Now that I have your attention hehehe

Thanks for pointing that HUGE typo out

After having added the normal and occlusion maps to the HD Village Interiors Kit Update I just fell in love.
To not add Normals and Occlusion to a package would be silly & stupid

The Village Exteriors Kit already has Normal maps but is also getting Occlusion maps and would be submitted using the new Unity shaders with the first FREE Update and all the other on the road map would have that added for each road map line item

LOL @Whippets I will let you come back and say what you think after it has been delivered
@smada luap I typed way slower than what I was thinking

Hopping between two pc's, re-submitting packages with Unity 5 that has not been yet, so that they would have a wider range of compatibility.

Added some news there in the TAD Sewer Kit v1.9.1 release notes

Cheers
Cobus

 

Just seen that TAD sewer kits has updated on the store. Says Untiy 5 shaders ready.

Nice

 

@docsavage AHA, you very observant

Here are the v1.9.1 release notes that was added

v1.9.1 --- Unity 5 compatibility
- Materials now Unity 5 Standard shaders.

>>> In the Pipeline <<<
Busy gathering texture data to do the HD Update with the results to be
- UNITY 5 READY & HD !!!
- 2 X Texture resolution
- Diffuse, Normal & Ambient Occlusion maps

I own www.tileadungeon.com , and have many more sets coming in the not too distant future, all with very different themes, but built to work together

Cheers
Cobus

 

Doc, that is only if the models are sculpted, such as a brick wall where the model has detail sculpted into the surface...and then a normal is made from the sculpt and baked onto the low poly smooth model. Then you get better results.

But most models are not made like this. They make their normals from the textures which works just fine and really is the only way to do it for "flat" surfaced models that you purchase. You can make the normals from the textures you make easily. I am sure an artist can say all this better than me. lol

Awesomebump looks fabulous! I have Crazy Bump and this is much better and it is open source. That should do nicely for you. It also makes the other texture maps for use with the Unity 5 Standard Shader. These will make your world look fantastic if you use 5. Feel free to PM me if you have questions and I will try to help you.

 

Thanks for the info and offer of help Telia. The support on this thread is fantastic.

Glad I could point you to that Awesomebump package. I only discovered it a couple of weeks ago but looks good.

 

@docsavage
I posted on this some time back but had trouble finding the post. Normal Maps are tricky to make and get right. There are several methods to make these but there is a very easy and consistent method to get excellent Normal Maps for....ANY....3D art asset. First your best options....then finally the very best option.

- xnormal :: 3D Art Normal Map Baker. Works really well for most 3D Objects. Takes some practice to get used to. Slow.
- Awesomebump :: mentioned above. Works well and is free. OpenGL 4.0 and QT required. Kind of slow like xnormal.
- CrazyBump :: much like Awesomebump but not free.
- Photoshop :: Normal Map plugin (by nVidia). This is a great plugin and works extremely well. Making many Normal Maps with this tool can get tedious. If you use Photoshop already.... for 5.0 to CS6 https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop
- GIMP v2.8 :: Normal Map Filter (not Insane Bump). As good as the Photoshop Normal Map Plugin but faster and far less tedious. GIMP remembers the current filter settings so simple keystrokes is all that is needed to zoom through normal map textures. http://registry.gimp.org/node/69

Tip: Always make normal maps from a flat texture and not the 3D Art.

So the absolute champ at proper normal maps is GIMP v2.8 with the Normal Map Filter. I work in Unity 4/5, UE4, and Esenthel Engine. The normal maps react exactly the same in all three engines. They are very easy to adjust power without the material going crazy. Also as light intensity fades to zero the normal map has a very soft fade to it. Most other Normal Maps have a 'Hard Fade' and flatten too abruptly. When your light goes away (which it does at times) you do not want a hard transfer to your flat texture.

Best Configuration pic is attached to this posting. Note....the scaling of 10.000 is usually your very strongest normal map. 2-3 is a good start for skin, 5-7 for rocks and stone. I usually start at 5.000 and see what happens.

Note: with a Logitech G13 or Programmable Keyboard you can keystroke simulate to make things MUCH faster.

Tip:
Always...repeat...always use a Diffuse/Albedo texture to make your Normal Maps. The per pixel transitions will be much more fluid and your lighting will react much more predictably. Again, leaning to very nice soft fade and clean textures in bright light as well.

Lastly, Ambient Occusion Maps. While you are making your Normal Maps....may as well make your Ambient Occlusion Maps as well. In GIMP v2.8 or Photoshop you can make settings to make this a real snap. To make them....use this sequence.
- Diffuse/Albedo => Desaturate
- Brightness/Contrast => Contrast to 50-ish then play with Brightness. Should end with a nice Black and White texture with some Grey Scaling in there. Practice makes perfect.
**GIMP and Photoshop react differently to Brightness/Contrast so the numbers will not be the same between them.

Cheers
O

 

@Olander

Thanks for the great info. I had no idea that Ambient Occlusion Maps where made so easily. I had already installed that Normal Map filter plugin for GImp but me being a beginner had no idea it was that good. It is very easy to use and like you said very fast. I will probably not bother much with awesomebump unless I ever need it's other features.

You mentioned using a Diffuse/albedo texture to make the maps. Is this an option built into Gimp or a way of constructing an image from new? I am a one man band and trying to learn everything

Thanks again for all the info and help.

 

@Olander

Just found an option to `desaturate` in gimp. Under Colours menu tab. It doesn't mention albedo though? Using Gimp 2.8. It's seems to produce nice images though. Well at least nice to my untrained eyes. You are a star sir.

It's amazing the quality of free software available. Blender, gimp, inkscape etc.

 

@docsavage Simply drag your Diffuse/Albedo (jpg/png picture or texture)...into GIMP then run the normal map filter.

 

@Olander,

Was doing that but didn't know that the original image was called diffuse/albedo

So much to learn. Wish there were more hours in a day and the energy to make good use of them.

Thanks again Olander.

 

@docsavage HAHA, HAHA, think the more time thing must be the highest item on all users involved in gaming's wishlist

Cheers
Cobus

 

Just noticed an update to Cave Adventure Kit.

 

HEHE
@docsavage my eagle eye friend

I have through this week tired to get to most the outstanding packages submitting with Unity 5.0.0
If you check under each package where the support email address , website and such data is,, Unity has gone and added a very specific line there.

" Package has been submitted using Unity 4.0.0, and 5.0.0 to improve compatibility within the range of these versions of Unity."

If a user is on Unity v5.x and wants to buy a package that has been submitted with any v3.x or v4.x there might be a pop-up that suggest that the package " might " have compatibility problems.

So I have taken the liberty, to download them each with Unity 5.0.0, change all the materials to use Unity 5 shaders.
I am then cool to add the Unity 5 ready logo on the main image for no set-up is required to us in any Unity 5 version.

On my plate:
- I am almost done with the first FREE Update >> Thatch for the Village Exteriors Kit
- I have started to gather HD texture data for the Tile a Dungeon - Sewer Kit HD
- In between working on unannounced projects

Cheers
Cobus

 

Update to the Cave Adventure Kit? As someone who is using the crystals right this second I'm interested to know if the textures are going to be HD-i-fied..

 

@kittik right at this moment not, have too much else to do

Hahaha, like that word " HD-i-fied "

 

Starting to get some basic houses put together. Still some work to do on these but they're a good start (especially as it mixes both the exterior and interior sets )

 

Very nice @smada luap
At the start I never thought about the no-glass option.
It was actually @Teila that spoke to me about it mentioning that at earlier medieval times it just was not there.
also even later the poorer folks could not afford it, just had shutter, cloth or even nothing in front.
I love the way that option worked out

 

Hey all 3DForgers. Just thought I would pass this along.....HUGE performance boosts to your projects.

I have had this for some time but until this point I have not done any optimizations other than camera stuff. There is a post a bit back about Mesh Merge to help improve things like batching and draw calls. ootii has a great tool for this as well as a couple others. There is something I have had for some time and it is completely free. Yes....free....and is astounding. And it works in Unity 4 or 5.

Draw Call Minimizer
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/2859

What it does is combines 'like' material (shader) meshes....but does it in a batching method at Start (Pressing Play) and it does it very quickly. Basically you create an Empty Parent Object (_ParkSquare1 as an example)....say a group of (8) 3DForge Buildings and anything else as this part of town. Drag the DCM Script onto the Empty Parent (_ParkSquare1) then drag your placed art into this parent after you have placed them where you want.

Now when you press Play the script goes to work combining anything it can into singular objects based upon materials. If everything has the same material there will only be 1 rendered object which means 1 draw call. If there are 4 different materials in there....4 Draw Calls. This also means that Unity Occlusion will see this the same and cull the combined objects out appropriately. Hence why batching smaller Empty Parents is recommended. The choice is yours on how much to combine or not.

Give it a try and watch your performance increase dramatically and spend so much less time using mesh combining tools.

Cheers
O

 

@Olander WOW, this is a GREAT find, I will use it myself for DEMOS
Being a completely non-coder, artist only person, this is worth gold
Thanks for sharing the good find and it sounds really easy to manage it as well in a scene and further improve performance

 

Oh, I just realized today that the exterior pack textures are 4k! Insane. I was wondering why the my game was running bad on lower speced hardware. So if you're having trouble, bring the textures down to a reasonable size and everything should work fine.

 

@EDarkness
4K, that is why those exteriors look so good

The Marketplace/Asset Store users keep asking for bigger file size as in higher resolution so I gave the LARGER HD size Diffuse Normal & Ambient Occlusion maps

Users that want to output to lower end devices or maybe Mobile, can half the size which will have in practice reduce the memory footprint by 75%.

HAHA, software can always reduce the size without trouble, it is the "HD-ifying" that they can not do, that is why I gave it like that

What is cool is that your project can then be output on say mobile and when you want to output at the same time or later to desktop, then no sweat, the HD files already on your machine.

You actually do not have to reduce them manually, just go to the texture and "tell" Unity to render them smaller and specify the size and apply.

Cheers
Cobus

 

Heh, the game ran okay on my main machine, so I wasn't even sweating it. Decided to do my monthly check on lower hardware and DAMN it was getting like 2FPS. I couldn't figure out why for the life of me, but after looking at the size of those textures and sheer number of buildings I had in that zone, it was a nightmare. So I adjusted all of them to be 2k. Runs fine again on that hardware. Whew. Crisis averted. Just figured I'd give everyone a heads up if they were looking at why their performance began tanking after using the exterior pack.

 

@EDarkness Glad that with such a small adjustment you can then cater for lower spec hardware as well

 

@S4G4N I know this is off topic, but what is your opinion on baked lighting in Unity 5 vs Unity 4? I am having a terrible time with it. I can't get results near the level I did in U4

 

Hey @spryx long time no see

I have also been having difficulty getting it to pump out what it used to in U4.
If you look at any of the Village Interiors Kit demos

Top Down:
Dragon Keep
http://www.3dforge.co.za/3DForge_DEMOS/FantasyInteriors_Village/DragonKeep.html
The Crypt
http://www.3dforge.co.za/3DForge_DEMOS/FantasyInteriors_Village/TheCrypt_TopDown.html
Stone Keep
http://www.3dforge.co.za/3DForge_DEMOS/FantasyInteriors_Village/StoneKeep_TopDown.html

FPS:
Green Dragon Inn
http://www.3dforge.co.za/3DForge_DEMOS/FantasyInteriors_Village/GreenDragonInn.html
St Alessandro Cathedral
http://www.3dforge.co.za/3DForge_DEMOS/FantasyInteriors_Village/St_Alessandro_Cathedral.html

I non not do any light baking, I used the normal lighting that Unity Tech now gave all users for free
I am not a code person, so no special optimization done at all and it runs nice and smooth on my machine.

I think they gave us the basics of backed lighting in U5 just to get it out the door and possibly working to fix it properly, to at least get the same results as U4 baked lighting

HAHA, If you d figure something out, then please give me a shout and let me know as well

Cheers
Cobus

 

@spryx I can confirm the same as @S4G4N states. In Unity 5 I never bake any lighting unlike Unity 4 where almost everything is baked. As long as your get your Pixel and Vertex lighting choices setup how you are designing then also the Cascade Shadow maps and Camera View Frustum you will have no issues whatsoever.

 

@S4G4N @Olander Unfortunately, I'm exclusively developing for mobile...and I feel U5's baking leaves a lot to be desired. I tried to express this to the UT team in this thread. The tech for U5 is quite impressive, but I believe the lights were tweaked in U5 to act similar to real lighting conditions (naturally, for the new PBR shader). I can't seem to get a straight answer from UT in this matter. As it stands now, I had to abandon my 3d mobile project and focus on 2d. The enlighten system in gamma seems to yield unflattering lighting with harsh banding and other oddities. Add to that horribly long baking times and not being able to visualize to the lighting beforehand...it is just a recipe for disaster.

Despite this, I love the exteriors pack! Every pack you come out with just blows me away with ideas...

Are you planning any HD remakes of the older packs by chance?

keep up the awesome work!

 

Hey @spryx

Thanks for supporting 3DForge assets

The Interiors Have received the HD Update the other day to be on par with the texture level of detail that the Interiors Kit was launched with.
That was very well received and all the package owners are very happy as well.

The Village Exteriors Kit is also going to be Unity 5 Ready with this first FREE Update tat is around the corner.
It will receive AO maps as well and be submitted and Unity 5 Ready

The Tile A Dungeon - Sewer Kit I have already started to gather the HD textures as it will receive the same HD treatment as the Vilage Interiors Kit, going twice the current resolution textures, Normal maps as well as AO maps.
The package already looking good, but will really bump it up a few more notches

Cheers
Cobus

 

Cross-post from another thread, but thought I'd show it off in here to give an idea as to how well the Exterior assets fit into a landscape

 

@smada luap the combination of buildings, the landscape, fog, skybox and lighting all comes together very nicely.
Al fits together very well and looks to be part of a believable environment, well done.

See a Fat Travel Portal up there as well

 

You sure do. It's activated so it would allow the player to progress to the next island (if coded, that is )

 

Managed to get all stuff in fantasy style and will soon post some screenshots here

we also edited some meshes and made some modular smaller parts like one pillar instead of the frame and such stuff to use it for ingame building. This is awesome and works good with the interior pack as well

 

@UltraTM

In-game Player housing systems would be a cool use of a modular sets such as the Village Interiors & Exteriors Kits

I have seen some of your work already and am sure others would like to see what you have done with your talent

Cheers
Cobus

 

Hey Cobus, how are things going? It's been a little quiet lately in this thread

I do want to say thanks a ton for the blueprints you put together, most notably the Mountain Entrance one. I was trying to create a perimeter but it just wasn't looking right, until I saw the one you put together. Now I can tweak that instead of trying to do it all manually, definitely a huge timer saver!

 

Hopefully he is hard at work on the UPDATE! hint.. hint.. lol

 

@Acissathar @Archania Absolutely working hard on the update.
I am glad that you like the BLUEPRINTS and a pleasure to give more FREE stuff to 3DForge supporters
They going to grow as each update is released and there are more building blocks to use.
So as new ones are dropped, you will just need the latest updated Village Exteriors Kit installed to have full excess.

I am on the last part in the pipeline to get the update completed, so soon soon

Cheers
Cobus

 

Awesome news. Knew a kick in the digital rear would make it almost done
It's going to be legendary!

 

An additional update of mine, on Cobus thread.

I have always liked the Cave Adventure Kit Crystals and thought I would share what I have done with them in a ~50 second video.

The Crystal is the first of many enemy types. The different colors representing different types of projectile.

This enemy type follows the Y value of the player and shoots at the player. The player won't be able to kill a crystal, the idea being to avoid the projectiles. Feel free to provide any advice on what else you think could be challenging. Things such as the rate of fire, speed and projectile aesthetics are subject to change.

Keep up the good work Cobus, looking forward to seeing more and more amazing assets that will be used in high quality games.

 

@kittik Very nice video clip, nice to see the very large internal space that you created.
I has a nice Temple / Cathedral type feel to it

 

There are times when I forget the amount of detail that's been put into the textures and normal maps, but it's only when I see things like this that I realise just how detailed it all is especially after the HD interiors update

 

Thanks @smada luap
It is really great to see the extra put it pop out and enrich the results for users in this way.

I have had many comments with users stating that every-time they build scenes,
they discover new parts/prefabs that they did not know was there.

One user even tweeted,

" Packs so big, you need a Map & GPS to navigate out of it " which I take as a huge compliment

Thanks for showing your work here, I am sure it is inspiring to others to see the results that Asset Store bought assets can end up like in a game project.

Cheers
Cobus