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--PolyWorld-- Low Poly Toolkits and More!

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by QuantumTheory, Apr 9, 2014.

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Would you consider purchasing prefab PolyWorld scenes, crafted by me, and published in the store?

Poll closed Aug 18, 2015.
  1. Yes, only if they are budgeted for performance, utilize existing packages, and have enough variety.

    4 vote(s)
    44.4%
  2. No, I just want new packs.

    5 vote(s)
    55.6%
  1. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    Polyworld is a continuing world of high-performance Art and Code packs to help you create a flat-shaded, faceted world inside the Unity engine.​

    • 4 packs to choose from: Woodland, Ancient East, Vistas, and Fantasy Interiors.
    • Use the tools to create your world using the familiar Unity Terrain engine, painting infinite terrain textures, then convert that to a faceted, PolyWorld terrain. A completely nondestructive terrain construction workflow enables you to iterate quickly and realize your vision.
    • Each themed PolyWorld pack contains numerous props and prefabs to fully realize your world.

    PolyWorld: Fantasy Interiors Overview


    PolyWorld: Woodland Toolkit Features

    PolyWorld: Ancient East Features

    • Imagine taking all the 3D art you can find on the internet, no matter how well they're textured, and suddenly having a game that looks 100% consistent in its artistic style. That is what the PolyWorld Mesh Converter script can do for you. With a single button press, take almost any Mesh-based gameobject, even Characters, and instantly convert it to the faceted style.
    • Included only in Woodland and Ancient East Toolkits

    Mesh Conversion Example

    • With the Modify Color component, found only in PolyWorld: Ancient East Toolkit, you can then take all those meshes you've made and effortlessly give them color variety. All meshes in the PolyWorld packs are compatible too!

    ______________________________________



    PolyWorld: Fantasy Interiors Page Link

    Fantasy Interiors Screenshots:


    ______________________________________


    PolyWorld: Vistas Page Link


    Vistas Screenshots:




    ______________________________________



    Ancient East Screenshots:


    ______________________________________



    This thread will contain all the Polyworld info, so be sure to subscribe and check back for updates! Also follow me on twitter @qthe0ry and view my product catalog at http://www.qt-ent.com! Thanks!
     
    Last edited: Jul 26, 2015
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  2. TheValar

    TheValar

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    Very cool, I've been wondering how to achieve terrain like that
     
  3. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    It was a good exercise in R&D. I tried to do it by just using the plain vanilla terrain system. I thought I could just edit the indices and go from there, but there is no access to that. Then I tried rendering a normal map, but then that would mip out at a distance, blurring the edges of the triangles. The goal was to keep everything in Unity, so I ultimately decided on converting it to a mesh. I know I'd sacrifice the automatic tesselation benefit of the Unity terrain, but then I realized a big gain: I can capture the entire diffuse layout of the Unity terrain and bake it to the vertex color of the prefab mesh. This allows me to paint as many textures as I want on the Unity terrain and get all that color variation in the faceted mesh. Very very cool.

    In experimenting more, I can take and create smaller Unity terrains, sculpt them, thenbake them down to a mesh to get specific features like cliff walls, rocks, etc. It's all saved as a prefab, so you can them instance and distribute the prefab around the level.

    Overall it's a pretty cool system. I've spent the day refining the editorscript, then I'll go on to fixing some small bugs in the system. After that, creating the artwork for the world begins.
    $polyworldwip4.jpg
     
    Cogent likes this.
  4. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    Early shots of the project:




    and a tilt shift one just for fun:
     
    Last edited: Jun 27, 2014
  5. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    $sss.jpg

    The Polyworld packs will include the terrain script, but also loads of prefabs and meshes based on a particular theme. This is just another WIP shot of a pack of standard woodland village meshes. The architecture and supporting assets (fencing, bricks, vines, etc) will all be modular so you can make your own building and put it in your project.
     
  6. KheltonHeadley

    KheltonHeadley

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    Give me this now!
     
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  7. sandboxgod

    sandboxgod

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    Haha that looks like a pretty neat asset
     
  8. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    So today I focused on the modular parts of the pack; rocks, bricks, flooring. You'll be able to stick these props onto walls, corners, the ground, etc to get some nice color variance and shadow-play. It might be funny to know that some of the rocks start out in ZBrush. Right tool for the right job, I say. Also made some modular vines. They're not precisely vines, but the color and shape give the impression of crawling foliage. They're not featured in this pic.


    $WIP6.jpg
     
  9. HeadClot88

    HeadClot88

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    You sir are awesome. When can I buy and how much?
     
  10. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    Thanks HeadClot88. It's not available yet. I aim to release it by the end of May at the latest barring anything catastrophic. The price will be under 50$.
     
  11. kenlem

    kenlem

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    Insta buy!
     
  12. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    Another wip shot. Testing out my array of prefabs by constructing a village. I feel I need more.
    $WIP7.jpg
     
  13. MadJohny

    MadJohny

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    I freaking love this art style :D
     
    Last edited: Apr 25, 2014
  14. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    Here's a second video involving the village and an interesting lighting setup.



    The lighting is all dynamic and there is a tilt-shift post effect on the 2d camera. The point lights in the scene certainly add to the art direction; most notably to the apex of the lower-leftmost house. It's almost like the buildings are translucent. There isn't any special lighting system used, but a single material for the entire scene with an image-based lighting shader.

    More progress on the village and terrain topology this evening. Made a list of needed props including, simple rocks, bushes, more trees, wooden dock/bridge, outside furniture, loads of signs, etc etc.. I'm also going to investigate water. The plan is to sculpt the water path using the terrain, use the script to convert it to faceted mesh, then apply a simple reflective material with animated vertex displacement on the y axis. I'm sure it'll look cool. Comments welcome!
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2014
  15. HeadClot88

    HeadClot88

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    I really want this!

    Also a few questions

    1. Will this run on Mobile Hardware? (Tegra 3 and 4 are what I am targeting)

    2. What will be included in this Asset?

    3. Will Unity Pro be needed to use this asset?

    4. Will the polyworld tool work on animated meshes?

    Also expect a Day 1 Buy providing that I am not broke. :D
     
  16. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    1. I've some tests to run yet for mobile, so it's tough to say one way or the other. With this art style, you do need some more triangles to effectively illustrate the texture on the surface. The big benefit is that it's all vertex colored, so running it through the vertex-lit rendering path should yield some very good performance. On Tegra3 and 4 the performance should be even better. We'll see. I test on Ipad 1, Iphone 4, Asus eeepad Transformer tf101. These are pretty low-end devices, but I also test on a Nexus 4 which is higher end. I'll post some numbers when it's time.

    2. What is planned so far for the first pack:
    • The Unity Terrain to Faceted Mesh editorscript seen in the first post.
    • a "Woodland Village" set of prefabs which consist of cottage-like architecture, windows, doors, chimneys, miscellaneous village props, wall sets, varieties of bushes and trees, flooring, lightsources, etc.. The pack is entirely modular.
    • At least one skybox with a faceted treatment, probably more. The facets will be in the texture rather than raw geometry like the scene.
    • The vertex color shader that also enabled image-based lighting.
    • A variety of handpicked, tested IBL cubemaps to use in the scene to get nice lighting.
    • A basic vertex-colored reflection shader that also animates vertices. This will be the water effect but can also be used for cloth. Still needs to be evaluated though.
    • Probably the excellent mesh combine and dropout scripts found in my Urban Construction Pack. Should help mobile devices on Unity Basic.
    • A nice demo scene
    • Documentation

    3. Nope! But it would help since occlusion culling will yield good performance boosts just like any other project in Unity.

    4. At its core, the tool takes the Unity Terrain and converts it into a set of regular mesh gameobjects. What happens after that point is up to you ;) I can write a tool to convert any mesh to vertex-colored and faceted but that is work for another day.

    If the pack does well enough, I would like to publish additional themed packs such as Industrial, Urban, LotR's Rivendell-themed, Floating islands, Rocky Canyons, etc etc.. What do you all think?

    [edit] BTW, it's likely that any terrain script that you guys use to sculpt the terrain, like ones found in the Asset Store, can be used with Polyworld. If you're religiously using one, let me know and I'll test it.
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2014
  17. HeadClot88

    HeadClot88

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    Hey quick question - Could you test this with Stitchscape ?

    It stitches your terrain into one big terrain and makes sure that there are no seams / Holes. I just want to make sure that this is compatible with that :)
     
  18. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    I'll give it a try when I can. If the result of running Stitchscape is another Unity Terrain, then it'll work just fine.
     
  19. sandboxgod

    sandboxgod

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    I think this asset will do very well on the store. The way you setup your scenes it looks very clean and professional. I think you will make a lot of money as long as you provide lots of example art like this. Such good quality work I will be subbing this thread. Make sure to post when this thread goes to Asset store so we get updated
     
  20. TonyNowak

    TonyNowak

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    Amazing aesthetic. I love the hard surface low poly look you have going, really awesome stuff. Keep it up!
     
  21. Munkkeli

    Munkkeli

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    This looks amazing. I'm a big fan of flat-styled things :D
     
  22. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    This is lovely, do you remember Vista on the amiga or Vista Pro on the pc a few years later? (Still talking early 90s, i dunno how old you are!)

    Instantly evoked that, i'm trying to think of a way I can use this, most likely after my current project, but it's lovely.

    Few things, i do religiously use a terrain shader, the rather good Relief Terrain Pack, it's packed with features, if this could fit into that so I can get all the stuff i generally expect from RTP, or at least a nice amount of it, that would be lovely too. Accordingly, i'm going to be getting truly stuck into Lux, a great open source pbr shader framework for unity that's turning heads and certainly impressing me! Hoping to use a bunch of skyshop tools for environment map generation and processing and Lux shading, i'm definitely interested in the idea of being able to keep the shading of everything in a scene consistent even in a wildly NPR approach, which i'm planning anyways.

    RTP also 'agrees' on part of its PBR approach with Lux anyways, so if you can make them all friendly, this will be one of those things i'll probably buy just cause the perfect idea may form at random, or since i'm pretty set on a very strange NPR approach anyways, it wouldn't hurt to 'plug it in' and see what happened with the above two much enjoyed shader systems playing nice with it if the notion appealed to you

    Great work anyways
     
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  23. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    Yes, I used Vista Pro when I was a kid. At the time it was seriously cool stuff. I loved making fly-through animatioins.

    Regarding RTP, if you can use it on arbitrary geometry, I suppose it would work just fine. Though, the idea is to have flat-colored faceted terrain, so RTP may be overkill.
     
  24. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    $wip8.jpg

    Made some new meshes the last two nights: old cart, barrel, well, firewood stacks, cut stumps, loose wheel, lit and unlit light sources. Just some decoration for in and around the village. More to come.
     
  25. lazygunn

    lazygunn

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    Yep, RTP can be used on arbitrary geometry (It works fine on voxel engines for example), but outside its use of POM detail textures, it has triplanar shading, dynamically applyable wetness (with rain droplets and slope-based flow) , snow cover, emissive surfaces, several ways to simulate global illumination and ambient occlusion, global colour and normal maps, as well as tree coverage maps you might generate in terrain composer especially if you use world composer, 4-12 detail textures depending on how you build the shader with excellent coverage options per detail layer, and so on, so it's quite well featured outside of just being able to put a few textures on a terrain. It can blend between the terrain and objects placed on the terrain too for a seamless look (And it can do this between meshes also). There's even more but i cant think of them right now - If any of those features are applicable or implementable in this, or even can quite easily do their normal thing except using this for the base shape and appearance, that would be very nice.

    Also I really like the above. I'm assuming you can choose how faceted things are, can you guide how faceted it is with some kind of map? I ask because it's a very particular look and i can imagine someone could have a great product out using it way before I got the chance, so i'm interested in its flexibility, because having had a think, if I can control the faceting with a map, ideally dynamically, that can become a conceptual basis in itself. Just having a lil think really. The thought of using it with quite fine faceting very much appeals to me
     
    Last edited: Apr 30, 2014
  26. nasos_333

    nasos_333

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    Looks great :), very stylish
     
  27. QuantumTheory

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    Just an update:

    So I decided to also include a modular cave prefab set. I figured out a workflow that makes it just very cool to be able to use caves in a world like this. The prefabs consist of just walls and ceilings. Leveraging the power and flexibility of infinite terrain textures, it was an obvious choice to use the terrain for the cavern's grounds. This means having to create a second terrain to cover the top of the cavern game objects, and that's where things can get interesting; When you realize you can use Unity terrain to create a basic, faceted mesh, Unity becomes a basic environment modeler ;) You aren't limited to creating walkable terrains. You can create cliffs, large rock formations, patches of water.. I'm really looking forward to seeing what people can do with this pack, but I will definitely need to do some video documentation to illustrate its potential.

    Anyhow, screenshots of the cave will be up soon.
     
  28. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    From the beginning, I decided to make the pack modular; All the architecture would be assembled like lego pieces. Same goes for the cave system. So I've started putting together some prefab architecture based on those pieces. You can either plop down these prefabs to make a quick village, or construct your own. Here is a shot of what I have so far:



    You'll notice everything is white. That's simply because I haven't begun colorizing. Some things do have color on them, namely the vines here in the lower right corner. They're modular too. Base chunks, wall chunks, corner pieces.. Here is a close look at that building:



    There is also a modular hedge fence you can piece together like the one wrapping around the pavilion which is also modular. Each piece of this building is made to snap on to the base house model, which is just a few walls, a large base, and a roof. Put some time into it and you can have a nice village ala Skyrim. ;)
     
  29. RC-1290

    RC-1290

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    Very pretty.
    Is that scene lightmapped or are you just using the Image Based Lighting with dynamic lights?
     
  30. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    IBL with dynamic lights.

     
  31. RC-1290

    RC-1290

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    Sweet! It looks 10 times better with your art assets than with my test cubes and spheres.
     
  32. XavLar

    XavLar

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    This is AWESOME!

    One quick question, will this work with scripted terrain, i.e Procedurally generated terrain, or 3rd party terrain generators?
     
  33. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    If it's a unity terrain, it will work. If you have a terrain you'd like to test, send me a private message with a link to a unitypackage.
     
  34. XavLar

    XavLar

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    Sent!
     
  35. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    Polyworld's terrain generation is compatible with Terrain Toolkit ;)


     
  36. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    I felt like I needed a larger demo scene, so I trashed the old one in favor of this. A bigger scene was needed to showcase the flexibility of Polyworld. I needed room for the wilderness, the modular cave system, and the village. Here is a shot from the early reveal:

    $wip11.jpg

    All the terrain was made in Unity, even the mountains in the background. On the left is the entrance to the cavern. It contains rooms, halls, slopes, and turns. Maybe there are a few treasures to be found..
     
    Last edited: May 19, 2014
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  37. sandboxgod

    sandboxgod

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    Art is still quite amazing. Adds a very nice, stylized look
     
  38. XavLar

    XavLar

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    Does Polyworld affect all meshes? I see that those trees are new.
     
  39. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    The Polyworld script is just for terrain generation. It converts Unity terrains to meshes, so it can be used for lots of things that terrains by themselves can't do.

    Everything else is a prefab or mesh, all of which you get to play with when you purchase the kit.
     
  40. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    I had a thought about using the Polyworld script to help create water geometry which is then animated via script. Here is the result:



    It's a work in progress, but I like how the vertex colors along the bank help fake a volumetric look. The script is rather expensive on a high poly terrain like this (~2ms on my cpu), but there is currently alot of overdraw. I'll also experiment with slowing down the update in the script. That should all help.
     
  41. goat

    goat

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    These are too nice.
     
  42. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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  43. GeneBox

    GeneBox

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    This is amazing. Brill.
     
  44. OutSpoken_Gaming

    OutSpoken_Gaming

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    Can you still paint the terrain after the terrain has been converted to the polyworld style?
     
  45. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    The first post showed the entire process in a youtube video. You create a standard Unity Terrain, paint however many textures you want, sculpt it, then hit generate. A faceted terrain is created in addition to the original Unity Terrain. If you want to change it, all you do is go back to the Unity terrain and make your changes then regenerate. It's simple and non-destructive.
     
  46. OutSpoken_Gaming

    OutSpoken_Gaming

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    Right I saw that and understood. I wasn't sure if you could still paint without having to revert back. It would be a nice feature to still be able to paint it so you could achieve a certain look easier.
     
  47. thoorne

    thoorne

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    Just insta buy. Looks gorgeous. Price doesn't matter :D
     
  48. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    Thanks! Wait til you see the webplayer demo.. Should be out in the next few days.
     
  49. Roachie

    Roachie

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    Cant wait to try/buy this, i love poly stuff, hope it comes with a huge variety of trees/structures
     
  50. QuantumTheory

    QuantumTheory

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    It's getting closer to release! Here is a video on what you can expect:
     
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