Low Poly City Building Pack

Hi everyone! I wanted to introduce a low poly city building pack I finished up today.

You can view the asset at:
fatbox Software Unity Shop - Low Poly City Building Pack

Here are some preview images and a Youtube video with complete turnarounds for each model.

 

These are wonderful, James. You do such great low poly work.

Questions:

1. Will these be on the Asset Store? I tend to buy all my stuff there.

2. Buildings 5, 7 and 10 seem to be missing roof details.

 

Good catch! They aren't actually missing the detail there (top ledges), I simply didn't put it in at first. Now looking at the images, I am going to put some ledges on those before the Asset Store submission this week. I am hoping to submit these to the Asset Store either today or tomorrow.

 

Fixed! I've updated the images above to reflect the new roof edge details for those 3 buildings. I'm working on adding some new buildings today.

 

Added a new building today, will try to add a few more and then submit this to Asset Store.

 

I went ahead and added a new building this morning, before I submit. For some OCD reason I felt better with the even number of (12) buildings total.

 

I spent an hour today slapping together a simple city street to show what these buildings would look like in an engine (Unity) with baked lightmaps.

 

What street system is that? Is it included?

 

It's another one of my modular kits on the Asset Store. It's not included in this building pack, this pack is an extra set of models which can be used in that kit. It's using a few props and streets from this kit I provide: http://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10971

 

Cool! Pretty sure I already own that one. I believe you gave it as a bonus with a car pack at one point. Thanks.

 

I do like your city set but I've away had a problem figuring out how to visually represent the end of the world. Would you consider adding some building faces to surround the outside edge of the city with?

 

Oo i could see this being handy.

 

Hi James,

I just went back to the building pack and remembered why I haven't used it yet. All the models are children of a root node and there are no prefabs. It's bit of a bear to work with. Does the version on the asset store have prefabs?

 

I found a script the converts selected objects to prefabs.
http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=CreatePrefabFromSelected

Still required a little bit of work but I'm able to start working with it now.

 

Yeah no I didn't create prefabs from it to be honest. Might have been a good idea. My take on it was, you bring in the models all in a single set and you delete out what you don't need or want. You then go in and move them about for what you need. I didn't create custom collision for those either as they were all really low poly, so it would have been diminishing returns to go with a slightly lower collision and make a prefab from it. Just checking on the Generate Colliders for the stuff works fine and gives everything a building would get from being a prefab. It also runs well on mobile as I've done tons of prototype stuff with these assets on my Galaxy S2. As for the ends of the world, I actually just used the big cube buildings as backdrops, just snapped some of the ridiculously low poly ones around the edges and done. It works well. For the gaps inbetween the buildings I provided all kinds of neat little walls and barriers, just use a wall or fence or something like that for gaps.

My workflow with a set like this is, generate the colliders in the inspector, drag the entire model pack into the scene. Move the entire set off of origin out maybe 200 or 300 units. Select what piece I want to start snapping and working with and disable all others. I then go back and find another piece I want and enable only that piece. Once I've assembled my city or whatever, I then delete all unused pieces. This new city building pack actually has individual prefabs with optimized collision, so I stepped my game up in providing ease of use with this kit.

 

Oh also if you want to do a very simple solution to city backdrops or skylines in the distance. Take a few of the buildings, put them next to each other, with a nice variety in size and such. Switch to an orthographic view of the front of your buildings and take a screenshot of the game window. Then copy this screenshot into Photoshop or Gimp, crop out the extra crud so you end up having a texture of the buildings from it. Make a selection around the edges of the buildings to the edge of the image and basically create an alpha channel for this texture, one that will only show the buildings and the rest of the texture is transparent. Save this new texture to Unity, create a Unity quad, create a transparent unlit material, drag that building texture into the material slot and then drag it onto the Unity quad in the scene. Boom, you have instant skyline city backdrop. You can also handpaint stuff in Photoshop or Gimp on the buildings, or paint new colors or details. I've used this in my Skate N Crash game for all backdrops in the city.

 

The pack is finally live on the official Unity Asset Store today:

http://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/22210