Creative Changing UV-Maps and 2D-textures made easy

Hi everyone,

we are a small group of developers who share the feeling that designing textures is a tedious, time consuming and distracting process if one does not have the luxury of leaving that work to a dedicated texture artist.

Intro

While buying entire asset packs makes it easy and relatively cost efficient to increase the visual beauty of your game, even without an art pipeline, at times, tweaks to existing assets for customization would come in handy.

Weapon skins for example allow for a neat feature that keeps your content fresh and unique. Ever thought about solely focusing on your game mechanics while leaving parts of the texture work to your audience of players and artists alike?

With this approach in mind, we started writing a couple of lines that provide the necessary functionality for you to import and just use.

It´s at an early stage, but it might be helpful when dealing with retexturing existing assets.

Features

• EASILY swap 2D-textures or entire materials from within the game.

• Get previews of your work locally BEFORE uploading it to a content delivery network.
  
  
• Intuitive interface and accessible menu to guide you.
  

Goal

We want to build a simple mechanism to attract artists who want to create additional textures for existing Unity games for fun, fame or profit. They take away the burden from developers who do not have the capacity or the time to work on many different versions of textures themselves. The ideal outcome would be that design work can be outsourced easily, while at the same time the artist isn’t bothered with complicated workflows that only work for your game. Allowing texture artists to focus on what they do best while making some extra money would be awesome, too.



Images

We will add images as we progress through our development:

Our first idea on the menu, with a small little fox to distract you

Demo

If someone is interested in this, let us know! We will have a demo ready soon.

Feedback

Do you share that feeling? We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas. We are still at an early stage, but any feedback is more than welcome!

 

We are making progress! Take a look at our menu-bar. Do you think this is the best way to position all buttons? Let us know what you think about the idea and the current layout!

 

Would this work well to re-texture assets that use a texture Atlas ? I am thinking
of 3DForge Village Exteriors Kit

Thanks

 

Hi Kenneth, great idea! We put it on our agenda. It will definitly be possible, we initially just didn't think about texture atlas. We will keep you updated about it

 

Thanks so much !!! I think that would open possibilities for many people.
Looking forward.

 

We are now working on implementing more camera options! We want to get our asset done by the end of the month. Wish us luck

 

Slow but steady progress. We added a toggle Menu to be able to see the whole scene. It gets messy quickly when you cannot hide your menus.

 

Todays lesson:
Streamlining the workflow-->
As a user, I want to get the uv map exported by clicking the path acceptance button, so that I do not have to click the export button again. We solved that by simply removing the necessity to presh a button. It's as easy as that.

We will soon be done with the first batch of features we want to publish at the end of the month. Stay tuned

 

Today I wanted to share with you our progress but not on the asset itself but on our teamwork. We started to review code and it helps us a lot. I hope you might take some insights from it as well. Have a nice day

A Quote of my colleague:
As a software developer, I want to learn from my peers as they review my code.
As a reviewer, I want to learn from my peers as I review their code.
As the product owner, I want to make sure that the master is always clean, and that the team collectively improves.

Good reads:

• https://www.processimpact.com/articles/humanizing_reviews.pdf
• https://medium.com/palantir/code-review-best-practices-19e02780015f
• https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/30/how-to-make-good-code-reviews-better/

 

Update on our tool to make UV-Map changing easier and allow for runtime changes. Today we are designing our menu structure. How do you like it?

 

Our last week!
We are planning on publishing a tutorial on hwo to use our asset. Should we go for a medium.com article?
Also we want to do a catwalk show, showcasing how our asset is working.

Do you like the idea? Feedback is welcome!

 

A final look at our asset! We are searching for game developer who would like to try and implement our seet into their game. If you are interested let us know!