Rooftop Hand In
Overview
The brief for this project was to create a realistic environment of a New York city rooftop.
The budge for this scene was 50'000 triangles with a maximum texture limit of 4 2048x2048 textures with an extra 1024x1024.
Research
To keep this project realistic I found reference of a real rooftop in NYC and decided to use that as the basis for my scene, I isolated elements of the image that would be key to recreating it in game,
Screenshots
Construction
Although the majority of this scene was created using unique assets, I used modular kits to create the highrise buildings in the background of the scene. Being able to adjust the materials on these kits using instances helped reduce art fatigue.
Textures
I split up the 4 2048 textures into mostly tiling textures at 1024, with some unique textures used for props being sized at 512. Due to the versitality of material instances the tilable textures I created went a lot futher towards dressing the scene than I had imagined, and I did not need to use the full texture budget, although I a few more uniquely textured props wouldnt have hurt.
Above: Tiling bitumen, brick, painted sheet metal, and fence trellace. Unique textures are for the parasole, and the plant pots with a tiling element for the hose pipe
Above: Tiling reinforced glass, bleached wooden planks, tiles, and miscilianous trims.
Above: Tiling glass highrise building. Unique props textures are for the foliage, water tower, and air vent
Materials
Similarly to the last project all of my tiling textures made heavy use of material instnces, this allowed me to add variation to my tiling textures and create a more unique looking scene while reusing the same textures.
Below: Indivdual kit elements selecting while forming a building
Above: Tile material
This material used a combination of a generated checker pattern and large tiling secondary normal map to add variation in the colour and angle of the tiles. The actual size of the texture would have made tiling quite obvious, but added variation masks the tiling.
Above: Tarp material and material function
This material function is used for correctly blending two normal maps in engine. I used it on the tarp material to blend a unique normal map with the tiling materials normal map.
Above: Translucent Glass
This material was for the glass that wasnt using the reinforced glass albedo texture, I used parameters that enabled me to adjust the colour rougness opacity and refraction on the fly.
Above: Reinforced Glass
This material set up was for opaque glass used on the skylights that I didnt want the player to see through. I used bump offset with an aditional texture to fake an interior seen through the glass.
Above: Corrugated Metal material
I used parameters to allow me to blend between two normal maps on this material. This essentially allowed me to create two very different looking textures through instances.
Above: Corrugated Metal material
To add variation to the bitumen material in addition to all the regular parameters I normally use, I used a mask to allow me to control the level of dirt on the texture.
Above: Texture used to fake an interior for the reinforced glass material
All the assets used in the scene come to 22,981 triangles total.
Conclusion
One of the things that I realised in this project was a the true power of tilable textures, with the right application they dont have to make a scene look repetitive, and they can really help at some consistency while still having subtle variation. Although I am happy with the level of deteial I acheived on the rooftop I would have liked to extend the rooftop to create a longer path for the player. However I think that more props would have been needed to fill out any extra rooftop without it beggining to fridnge on art fatigue. I think the simple refined colour pallet worked well to make the rooftop look aesthetically pleasing while still being realistic. If I did this again I think I would create a modular kit in addition to the unique geometry for creating the main rooftop, so I could extend the play area.
In conclusion I am not displeased with my rooftop scene but I do feel that I could have taken it a lot further given how useful I found my tilable materials once I started applying them.