3DForge Exteriors

Thought i post something more fun than issues and questions : D
Blocking out the main city in the game im currently working on.
One thing that came in handy a LOT was triangular cobblestone tiles, i just split the smallest one in Blender in both directions and they are great for adding a bit more variation than just doing straight lines. Might be something to consider adding to the standard version?
The terrain is sloping quite a lot so the solution became to do a terraced city, not to wagon friendly but i thing it looks good and makes it a bit more interesting to explore.

 

Hi @virror

Thanks for showing.
That was the idea with the plinths, that you can do layouts on VERY steep sloped landscapes.
Something that I think very early on was mentioned that I will surely add are ramps that can be placed where your staircases are now. They will not be as steep as the stairs are. At least 50% or more that what the current staircases are.

Cheers
Cobus

 

Could we have ramps that are double and treble the length - much gentler gradients - so that carts can go up them?

 

Hi @Whippets

That is what I meant by "At least 50% or more that what the current staircases are"
They need to be way less steep.
It will be a small modular set add on with normal straight ones, elbows left and right and all sorts of joining landing so that you can solve many options.

Cheers
Cobus

 

And the triangle tiles ; p
Sounds like a good idea with the ramps though.

 

New day, new progress : )
Still debating with myself if i should cut a floor of the inn or not, looks a bit ridiculous next to the wall : D
Also worried about performance here.

@S4G4N Are there any doors for the gates? Cant find any, would be a great addition if not ; )

 

Hi @virror

There are a few over here
Assets\3DForge\FantasyExteriors\Village & Towns\Prefabs\CastleCathedral\Castles\CastleExtras\CGates
But I thing a nice addon of some others including wooden ones will be good

Cheers
Cobus

 

To combat all the cobble tiles repeating and save performance you could just used the terrain tools to flatten areas to desired heights and then paint them with different textures. All you need to do then is just blend the 3dforge meshes/walls where needed. You'll get the floor looking much nicer for no extra cost. At least in my opinion.

 

@S4G4N Yeah, some wooden ones would be great!

@docsavage There are some bugs in the texture shader im using so waiting to get them fixed (Megasplat). I need the floor meshes next to the harbor and the terraces to hide the change in terrain height, but i will try and blend them for sure when i have the shader working. Im not too afraid of tiling since there will be houses, props and npcs around and you will not really see it from that angle either.

 

Hi everyone,
A new package has been released by @AdamGoodrich & @NatureManufacture
CTS (Complete Terrain Shader)
It is running with a nice launch discount as well








Cheers
Cobus

 

Looks great. Will be good to see some 3dForge assets and scenes with these terrains.

 

You will most certainly

 

I bought this yesterday. Is there an easy way to set up LOD with these? If so how do I do it?

Thanks

 

Hi,
Thanks for supporting 3DForge assets.
You are going to be happy to know that LOD wise they are actually VERY LOW POLYGON as is.
Several users have happily reported back that they could not get LOD tools to lower them further.
One that comes to mind is @Olander

Cheers
Cobus

 

Oh so nice...so they can be used on mobile? Also I have Gaia to use with this

 

I have had many feedbacks and reviews compliment the assets to be suitable for such projects as well as VR where you need high performance and things like correct out the box scale.
It is one of the main reasons tho have separated Interiors and Exteriors so that you the developer can manage and add what you want and scale if with your own tests and the target market.
That is why you have see though windows as well as not see through ones.
I did not want to force something that causes you project to at the end delivers a bad user experience.
No good you have all the bells and whistles and it looks super good but it runs well only on the latest hardware that a very small % of users have and can afford.

***Please dont forget to STAR rate and maybe later review any 3DForge assets that you do have.

Thanks again for your support

 

Haha its great that you explained all of that...I did enjoy reading it (no sarcasm intended) thank you for the information

 

Completely taken as positive feedback
At the end, I try build long term relationships. I want you to be back for more, not be unhappy because my assets was an obstacle in your project.
Thanks again for your support.
Cheers
Cobus

 

@ShadOrfeo @S4G4N
Indeed LOD is actually quite simple to set up on these. There are two options for you to use 3DForge assets, neither of which require any sort of decimation of the meshes for LOD.

Method 1 (The one I use):
- I export the meshes in OBJ format and set every one of them up in Blender.
- Then put together these together in Blender to form your buildings as a unit.
- Then Export as FBX the entire lot and import into Unity. Remember to set Scale and Rotation to 0,0,0 and each of your mesh origins to 0,0,0 as well.
- Drag the building into the scene and check for 0,0,0. Make a Game Empty and set that to 0,0,0 and change the name to what you want. Add LOD Groups to that and simply remove two segments and leave only LOD0 and Culling. I set culling to about 15% to start and go from there.
What this method does is allow you to remove unwanted mesh on some parts that you want to 'glue' together which keeps their UVs and comes into Unity as a full building....which various mesh segments can be turned on or off if needed for simulated in game building.

Method 2:
- Just like Method 1 except put the meshes together in Unity or use the 3DForge Prefabs as a start and go from there.
I cannot use this method because of my game naming standards. So I do the extra work involved in making ALL 3D Art form into my naming standards. The scripts require this.....which I coded. It follows NWN1/2 closely. If you only care about the naming of the Main Prefab then fine....just do what your game dictates. Method 2 will work fine and save quite a bit of time.

Cheers
O

 

Hey @Olander

I really appreciate you popping in and sharing some knowledge with the others here on how to do this in a professional manner. It always puts a smile on my face to see you around and I read every word you write

Cheers
Cobus

 

Any time good sir.
Of note...it never ceases to amaze me how many combinations that can be made from both the Interior and Exterior kits. Absolutely confounding. Best value to be had in any store....any where.

I'll have some good screen pics of what can be done by 'thinking outside of the box' with these kits.

Cheers
O

 

Thanks for the compliments

Please do share when you get the time

 

I can confirm this with SimpleLOD which I use on almost everything and it works great. I don´t even attempt it anymore on 3DForge packs since they are so well optimized. If you are making very complex buildings you can bake the meshes together but you have to be careful with that depending on your lighting system. In a village exteriors setting you may end up using point lights for streetlamps which could make a combined-mesh actually perform worse than if it is left in pieces (depending on your lighting set-up).

Edit: Anxious for the next update, stretched hides and the beehive are huge objects in what I am doing.

 

Interesting. Could you elaborate on this at all? I've been using Unity for a couple of years now, but I'm still just starting to dig into how its lighting works.

 

Not an expert at all. But basically if the camera can see an object, every light source affecting that object requires a draw call, even if the part of the object affected by the light isn´t viewable by the camera. So if you combine a building into one mesh and there are streetlamps on the opposite side of the building from the camera, they all must be processed on that item . However, if the four walls of the building are separate objects, then the lights that are hitting an out of sight back wall are not processed because that back wall is never drawn.

It is never really an issue unless you combine objects into a single mesh which are far apart on your map or if you have a lot of light sources. The advice I was told was that just to avoid falling into a trap, there isn´t much of a reason to combine objects that cannot possibly be seen by the camera at the same time.

 

@Carve_Online
You stated this quite well. This is a big difference in something like Unity 4.6 and how Unity 5 works...or at least it is now. Unity 5 has been really tough with getting lighting to work in how they did the GI. It became incredibly difficult to use both baked lighting and GI in a scene. I took the GI route and had to figure out how to tune Unity 5 so that I did not have to do any light baking at all. Which is also one of the reasons I went on to the UE4 engine for some time.

With Unity 5.4+ the GI has gotten a lot better. Now with an improvement in shadows from a 3rd party product and setting your shadow strength to no higher than 0.75 and always using Soft...Unity turns into something really awesome....with NO baked lighting. For some situations a game may want baked lighting in lieu of GI lighting but it is still a case where they are still a bit troublesome to use together.

Improved Unity Shadows:
Next Gen Soft Shadows $15 USD <= incredible
www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/79454

Also I would like anyone who really wants to get deep into how Unity handles their lighting...which also applies to rendering engines in general....please read this Unity Blog....a really good read.
blogs.unity3d.com/2015/11/05/awesome-realtime-gi-on-desktops-and-consoles/

Always great discussions with talented people.
Cheers
O

 

anyone have a video on the actual modular building phase? Would like to see how difficult it is to build a house.

 

Hi @Wishymashy

I would like to think they pretty easy to build them. The simplicity of the Modular system is what makes the package so powerful to make so many different designs. Here is a screenshot to shot the simplicity of it.

The wall texture used here is one of 6 different ones included in the package, giving you a HUGE almost endless combination options. You can use one of the two stone textures for ground floor for argument sake with a plaster or wooden textured first floor.

Those internal core blocks you see, represent the modular size that the Village Interiors Kit parts are, so if you later want to add your own interiors, they would snap right into place like below.


The Village Exteriors Kit comes with 80 pre-done building included and another 276 FREE BLUEPRINTS from the 3DForge Website BLUEPRINTS section downloadable right now, all pre-done and ready to use.

If you need anything more, then please let me know

Cheers
Cobus

 

Thanks for quick reply. Do all items snap together? Sorta like the game The Sims? Trying to find something that's very easy for my wife to play around with.

 

I purchase this and the interior, is there a short guide somewhere? I tried to build basic house but I tried using the snap it didn't line up properly, don't think I'm doing it right

 

Hey there,

I use Vertex snapping and can also recommend something like ProGrids2

Unity Vertex Snapping @ 1:01 but the whole little video very informative

It you look at the very first post on this forum you will see the basic modular system that the Village Interiors & Village Exteriors Kit's both use.
Included in the Village Exteriors Kit you have two included demo scenes that gives you actual models showing step by step how it works. Step by Step 1 Basic House & Step by Step 2 Double Story House

Here is text from that first post:
1. Build your own shapes with the CORE blocks or select from the many pre-built ones.
(these CORE blocks matches the shape and sizes of the Village Interiors Kit modular system)
2. Add the appropriate wooden Frame and then hide/uncheck it once you happy.
3. Add the wall blocks selecting from 6 textures sets.
- 2 x Plaster textures (old & new)
- 2 x Wooden textures ( Vertical and Horizontal planks)
- 2 X Stone textures
4. Un-hide the frame from STEP 2.
5. Add roof of choice from 5 styles.

Those Core blocks are the exact size that the Village Interiors Kit modular sizes are 2,5m x 2,5m x 3m

Since you have both the Village Interiors Kit & the Village Exteriors Kits you can also go ahead and down the FREE Premium BLUEPRINT Package PB Sword & Shield Inn that contains both interiors & exteriors
Another Bonus selection of Pre-built houses are another bunch of building to use as examples and learn from are there FREE BLUEPRINTS from my website.

Please shout if you have anymore questions

Cheers
Cobus

 

great thanks! this will be extreme helpful.

 

This is great info. A bit of advice. I was trying to use this and it would not work for me. The vertex selector was flashing and making it a game of reactions to make sure it selected the vertex. Drove me to insanity. I was cursing unity blaming the engine. Then one day realised that my keyboard has something called n'key rollover. Basically an automated repeated key press. It was trying to select then not select the vertex about once every 100ms. Improves reaction times no end but no fun when level building. I switched that off and it all worked great.

Long story to short. Make sure you have n-key rollover switched off if your keyboard has it

 

You will not believe how many long time Unity users never knew about Vertex Snapping, my left hand lives on that key when I am in Unity.
Speeds up production on whatever you doing and accuracy is a breeze

 

Totally agree. That's because your asset packs snap together well without scaling issues If devs get that wrong the vertex snap is redundant.

 

So many asset packs have scaling issues that render them useless.

 

yep, or nine million materials per pack and gameobjects with 200 child transforms per object. The amount I bought for my game that look great and are generally well done but not optimised at all. Optimising can end up taking so long I ended up not using the packs. SImpleLOD, meshbaker (both great tools BTW) etc can help in some cases but I've had issues where dodgy meshes won't combine etc without corrupting.

 

This pack has no scaling issues, but I have bought a few that did. The one saving grace is that the entire pack usually can be rescaled with the same multiplier, so it is really not that hard to rescale them in a couple of braindead minutes within Unity. I have a ´every project´ pack that I install into any new unity project, and one thing I always have available is a 2m tall capsule for checking scales of any new package I buy.

 

I have on purpose made doors and a few other things larger then real life.
I did this after buying characters on the AS for making demos and found that normal real life door sizes just had the characters stuck and the playing experience ruined.
Every-time someone used my packages for VR they have commented specifically on the Scale and happiness with regards to it and their experience when testing their own projects.

 

Hey gang.. I know I've been quiet a while. That never-ending dealing with health issues drama.. lol I was finally able to work through some system issues on my tower and have recently been back in development mode, mostly helping with betas for some upcoming asset releases. In working with designing some terrains to use with testing, I dug back into a yet to be released Gaia stamps pack and started also playing with the 3DForge blueprints, mostly from the exteriors pack (a couple that use both interiors and exteriors), along with the Gaia 3DForge extension to spawn some homestead type POIs.

These areas are still unfinished but I wanted to show a little of what you can do using the exteriors kit and the blueprints that Cobus provides. The terrain for this particular stamp is a bit rough, so I bumped up the slope settings in Gaia's resources settings for the village and homesteads with the intent to go back and later tweak and rework the spawn. This is why the fences and some of the game objects are on a lot steeper hills than you would want. I just haven't tweaked yet.

This first image is of the ForestVillage11 Gaia POI that is in the Gaia extension. If you have both Gaia and the exteriors kit, you should see a 3dforge selection within the GX area of your Gaia Manager. With this particular shot, I was working on switching from the default shaders to the shaders included in Dynamic Nature Starter from @NatureManufacture in order to get snow on the buildings and game objects.


I haven't started doing anything with snow and the plants yet. The trees with snow are a speedtree winter variant of that tree.

One of the homesteads spawned down by the huge lake. I eventually scrapped the homestead, leveled the area, added walls, towers, etc from the recent castles update (well not sure how recent, but recent for me since I haven't been in Unity for a bit) and I started building the port town of Winterhaven. Following are screen grabs of Winterhaven and Winterhaven Harbor. Other than the crane and boat under construction (from Unity's Viking Village demo) and the docked ship (from the Arctic Castle asset), everything else within Winterhaven is from the 3DForge Interiors and Exteriors Kits.


View of Winterhaven Harbor from the forge..


Winterhaven from outside the wall.


Looking into the city from the lake...


Top view of the scene showing the geography of the stamp and give you an idea of size. The little icons are where Gaia spawned 3Dforge homesteads and village. The one up by the lake is where Winterhaven is located and the small town one is the village in the first image. The other arrrows are just normal homestead POI spawns.

Assets used:

3DForge - Interiors Kit, Exteriors Kit, Blacksmith Forge (interior and exterior demo asset), various blueprints
Gaia - Stamping and initial terrain texturing
Backwoods Gaming - yet to be released polar area stamps pack (hopefully coming soon)
Vegetation System (currently in beta) - awesome vegetation management system.
Dynamic Nature Starter - snow shader for objects, ice, various nature models
Suimono - water
Tenkoku - sky
CTS - terrain shader, terrain snow distribution, and geological layering of mountains
Speedtree - American Elm, Alaskan Cedar, Blue Spruce trees
Turboscalpeur - RUSTIC Grasses and FERNS World
Unity Viking Village demo - medieval shipyard crane and boat under construction
Arctic Castle - ship that I have docked in Winterhaven Harbor
EDIT: Oh.. Forgot to add Compass Navigator Pro which is where the cool little icons came from.

hmmm.. I think that covers them all... lol

I'm currently waiting for a new road asset to carve out roads between locations.. Once that is done and I have lighting tweaked, I'll throw together a video using Pegasus and Helios showing the different homesteads and the forest village after it is finished.

Every time I dig into the 3DForge packs, I'm amazed at the amount of stuff in there and the stuff I'm able to create with it! Keep up the awesome work Cobus!

 

@Shawn67 Looking awesome. Love the layout and look of all this.

 

I have been working on a Gaia, CTS & Fog Volume 3 integration, and obviously Village Exteriors (already integrated) also plays a big part as shown here - and these new integrations will be launched very soon and will be free - a couple of clicks and all done and set up for you. I was just blown away at how pretty even randomly generated procedural stuff could be!!

 

Always welcome and cool to see what you are doing with some stunning results.
Those look like the included Point of Interest (POI) little farm layouts you have used there.

Thanks for sharing Adam

 

@Shawn67,

Great shots. Hope your health is picking up. Good to see you here either way

 

Thanks @docsavage! Health pretty much is where I think it is going to be. Just adapting and trying to find ways to work around it.

Great to be working in Unity again. I'm going to have to re-learn a lot of stuff that I knew that the brain fog ate, but I'm getting there. heheh Working on all my foliage areas for Winterhaven now (testing Vegetation System by @LennartJohansen), loading it down with props from Cobus' interior and exterior kits, and then will be adding shaders for Snow System (from @NatureManufacture's Dynamic Nature Starter pack) to the building and props. Dynamic Nature is working great so far with Cobus' models! And the slider works great going from no snow to heavy snow. All I need to do is learn how to adjust it via code to change with weather.. heheh

Lots of cool tools have come since I was last able to work much with Unity and some awesome new ones in the works!

 

Sounds like you having fun with all these new toys Some assets on the store are really maturing. High quality kit.

 

Hey everyone,

I am working on some completely new packages, but took a short break and am adding some very cool FREE parts to the Village Exteriors Kit that I am sure many of you will be very happy with.
This update is around the corner, so you would be able to add these great parts to your scenes soon soon
I will post more pics tomorrow as I add them to the package.

Let me know what you think









Cheers
Cobus

 

This seems very interesting, probably well worth it's price, is there a way to procedurally generate new pieces based on your assets, but bent and stuff? I mean, I'm sure it is a possibility in general, but does your package include that option?

 

No - its an art asset which can be snapped together in any way you want.

However there is nothing to stop you from making this your self, or using something like Dungeon Architect with it.

 

Nice, looking forward to that new update @S4G4N