Assets [RELEASED!] New Cave Asset Pack: Grand Caverns

UPDATE 08. 06. 2019:

FINALLY RELEASED AFTER ALL THIS TIME!
Hope you enjoy it!

https://assetstore.unity.com/packag...VkZRD5Jjviv7MLvMiF4UgMYsEmBU_j4M8vwtGVlHlIy8s



UPDATE 11. 05. 2019:

The Grand Caverns Series - Dripstone - Demo Scene Flythrough Video & Trailer

EDIT 11.05.2019: Please note that I scratched the Assets you can see below in this post, they will no longer be part of the pack. Instead I have completely redone all assets, plese scroll down to see the new stuff!

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Hey Everyone!

My name is Simon "Malachistos", I am an All-Arround-Artist from Germany.

For the past year, I have been working for a small gamecompany in Berlin.
We used Unity for all our game projects. And always since discovering this platform, I wanted to do some Asset packs myself.

For my first one, I just had to do a Cave Pack!
I really, really, really, really dig Dripstone Caverns. Just take a look at this fantastic images:

What is there not to love?

But since this is my first pack and you are the people who, hopefully, will be going to end up using it one day, I decided to present my work early on, so you can give me a feedback and help me shaping the final result.

Things I will be using while making this:
- ZBrush 4R7 - almost anything will be handsculpted in this pack.
- Substance Painter 2 / Designer - for the final textures
- Blender - Unwraping and Mesh corrections
- Photoshop CC for Texture-Materials and Atlas creation

Here are a few "WIP" pictures of were I am at right now. No Walls and ceilings yet.
These are WIP, so please chime in with any thoughts you might have.
Textures are subject to change, Textures are never done.

Thank you and I hope you like what you see so far!

 

that first image looks really cool, will follow your progress

 

Hey thank you Mister D, glad you like it so far!

Update for today:
I did 12 more "Draperie" Sculpts bringing the count up to 24.
12 More to go!



I did a first unwrap and a lowpoly of Nr. 20.
Here you can see my first pass in Substance Painter, then rendered in Marmoset.
Tricount is 1.397 for this Prop.



Unfortunally it does not look like that in unity. Since the texture came out rather "grey".
So it currently does need a lot of lightening. Not shure If I should color the textures ore not.
Anyway, I am not happy with the "Stone" look. I would like it to look more like actual Dripstone.
Maybe I will end up delivering these things with 2 Texture Sets, not Shure.

The base textures of each of these Objects will be quite small, so that I can fit 4-5 of them onto a 2k texture Atlas.
I will however add a Detailmap to everything (So it will not really be that noticeable).

Question:
Would you prefer four 2k textures ore a larger 4k atlas per ~12 of these?

 

This is wonderful!!!!

I love caves and visit the ones in my country as much as possible. I would love to use your assets in my game to recreate a realistic cave. I am a geologist, so my interest is more than just as a game developer.

The cave in the movie is absolutely amazing! Where is it located? I have seen some similar caverns here, but nothing so huge and majestic as the one in your movie. Beautiful!

 

Hey Teila! Thank you!

The "Cave of Wonders" is located in Spain (From the website: The Cave of Wonders (la Gruta de las Maravillas) is located in a beautiful town called Aracena) http://intothecaveofwonders.com/

 

I prefer what looks better.

 

Thank yo for the reply!

I am STILL working on this project, sorry I have been quiet, my focus was occupied by another non-game project which is about to release tomorrow, scary: http://vis.versilstudios.net/vsco-2.html#more-info).

Cave Stuff:
There are so many decoration objects at the moment, too many to be performant if I chose to texture everything, so I am investigating other methods of texturing. Like Substance Designer and procedural textures, which would lift a huge burdon on calls. Still learning the Sofware and doing tiny baby steps. But, this will be my main-focus for the next few weeks, so there will be updates!

 

Even 100 unique objects each with unique texture will not cause problems with drawcalls. But it makes sense to atlas textures on small objects.

 

Hey guys,

I am very sorry for the late update (a year later haha),
but the project is still alive, again!

Unfortunally for you I got hired on some other projects and had to abandon the asset pack for a while.
But as of two weeks ago, I am now continuing to work on it again!

I changed up a lot off stuff.
First of all, uhm... I scratched everything I made so far.

Yeah.

It did not look like I wanted it to look like, so I used the time inbetween to update my skills, plan and research.
The new pack will be in a slightly different form, probably less fluff, more cave. But it will be for the better.

Now most objects will use tiled textures in combination with vertex paint on the models, to simultaneously allow me for more details and hopefully even less drawcalls / texturememory. "Optimized" if you so will.
Hopefully this will allow me to instead focus on more model variation.

Here are some tiled textures I have been workin on in the past few days:

2048x2048 (but can be scaled down to 1024x1024 without loosing a lot of quality).
I do not want to use 4096x4096 textures for anything, because really, it is not needed.

Each PBR Texture will now include:

- Albedo
- Normalmap
- MetallnessRoughness
- Ambient Occlussion
- Heightmap
- Emissionmap

I decided to pre-pack those textures to work with the Vertex Tools Pro v2 setup.
So:

- Albedo + Metallness
- Normal
- Height + Occlussion + Roughness + Emission

Cheers,
Simon

 

Does it mean, it will require some special shaders?

 

Not if you don't want to. I will try and provide some basic shaders made with shaderforge. But I will use the same texture setup described as above used in "Vertex Tools Pro". So you could just swap arround. But you don't need to.

 

I still love this!!

 

Wouldnt be better to use basic and detail texture with some mask and alfa (instead of vertex paint)?

 

But then I could not blend 3-5 materials together to make it look like this (3 texture sets here):
Masks are to hard edged, and I would have to make a mask for every single object. It would maybe be okay for stuff like simple rocks, but I want to do more for now.

 

Looks fantastic. I might pick this up down the road.

 

Today I did first tests for rooms,
I know, I mentioned earlier that I want this to be more modular, but I need something for testing, scale and a Backdrop for building assets. So I may just do a mix of both.

Sculpting rooms in ZBrush:

and scaling and editing in Blender:


UV in 3D-Coat:


First room, in Unity. Sorry about the potato recording quality, I do not know what is up with OBS Studio today.
I recorded this ~10 times, and did not find suitable settings:

Still, after testing I find that I am in need of a darker, more rocky texture. Else it is just too smooth maybe.

Here is a test with baked lights:

 

Ok, makes sense. What about using decals? You can use decal with some parallax shader to achieve great effect.

 

Optional of course as not all games can handle the performance hit of parallax.

 

Unfortunally I am not a programmer, so making shaders is not one of my stongest talents. So I have to make due with what I can do. (I could use shaders from the Asset Store to demo the Assets, but I can hardly included those into my own.

Did 30 Lowpoly-Dripstone Assets today. (~300-4.500 tris)
I notice now, that this is probably not even half the selection I am going to need. Still need Draperies, stuff for the ceilings... ponds, wall decorations, probably some stone too... will be a long week to come and a lot of Assets.

Any suggestions for a Lod generator that also keeps vertex paint information?

 

I actually hate it when assets have their own shaders. I prefer to add my own. Some past popular assets have been criticized for their custom shaders which are rarely updated and are used to hide imperfections. Removing the shaders to use our own is usually a disaster as the asset looks terrible, making the older assets obsolete very quickly. I am very cautious these days about buying any model asset that is packed with a special shader.

There are plenty of nice shaders out there, including LUX which is free. There are shaders that add grass, or snow, or whatever else one would want.

Much better to release with the standard unity shader and let us decide what works best in our games.

 

I understand that, but the Standard shader is sooooo limited. I wish Unity would start providing basic (in todays standard) shaders.

I can do nothing of the stuff I would like with the Standard shader. I would have to bake every Asset. I mean, I am not opposed to baking all my Assets if that is what is wanted.
Still, the Caves corridors and rooms would require a shader which uses vertex colors for different Textures. I currently use: Vertex Tools Pro for this. But It is also limited to 3 Textures. (With vertex colors you should normally be able to do 5). I will look arround.

Maybe you can suggest a shader-pack (side from Lux, I will have a look) I should look into, then I will use this one for development and link it in the published Asset on the store?

My only concern is that with providing no shaders during release, users would have to link and build all materials by themselfs. I can imagine the angry mob already.

Edit: Whoa, Lux, looks very interesting. Translucency maps! I was actually searching for something like this, I bet It would look really nice on Dristone stuff. Thank you!

 

How about this:

- I will use the Standard/Lux shader and just bake the props. (So people can use the Standard shader, but I might offer translucency maps aswell)

My concern is that with ~100 Assets, there may be to many baked props in a scene?
Of course you normally would not use everything simultaneously.

- I will still paint the large assets with vertex colors (Cave parts), and offer the different environment texture sets by themselves? But the parts will use the standard Shader during release (which is limited to one texture).

/: Altough I really wanted to do a large playable demo scene.

 

Performance hit of several parallax textures is insignificant. It makes difference only in big numbers, like 200 parallax surfaces in frustum, but even in such numbers we are speaking about 20% difference. Decals are very useful for detailing surfaces, you can easily LOD it (decal will have different LOD settings than main object) and display it only for very short distance (LOD0 parallax, LOD1 normal, off), which for interior scene makes perfecf sense, you dont need to see paralax texture 200 m, usually 5 m is by far enough. So you can add TONS of details for virtualy no performance costs. No theory, but practical experience.

But of course there is problem with Unity, which is technologically by far inferior to other engines, so even in 2017 there are no shaders/tools like in other engines and even critical features are not part of core, but only as 3rd party plugin, which is very very tricky for any serious use (support, resell, etc....)

 

No, and the smart person would use culling on the parts not seen by the player. And probably bake light maps since it is "interior" and the light won't change.

 

Wow! That is some rich looking models! Nice job.

 

So,

this is not a necro post, I am still working on this!
I am reviving/updating this blog, because I have been slowly working away on this and it is almost ready for release!

But the project changed drastically...!?


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First a little disclaimer:
Please be aware that most of the assets you can see above this post have been redone and or replaced.
So just in case you come across this blog while planning to buy this asset, be aware that the above stuff was in progress stuff that is no longer included.

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Why has this taken me so long?
Well, I was never really satisfied with how it looked so I kept working and working and improving.
Then Unity announced the HDRP workflow and that changed everything! But it looked so nice, so I had to change it up.
Luckily the new HDRP Shaders finally have Subsurface Scattering! A feature just made for dripstone materials.
I really had to have that. So figured that out and learned the whole HDRP workflow thing.
It... took me some time as you can see because I have a dayjob and this started out as a hobby.

So let me appologize for the delay.


So what will be actually in it?
A lot! But different then described above.

-> Project is now based on the HDRP workflow, which I realize is not fully released yet, so not good for everybody. But thats what I did come up with. (Unity 2019.1.1f1 at the moment)


-> 93 Dripstone Assets!
(93 prefabs, Between 3-7 Lod Stages + Colliders = 425 individual Models!)

-> 52 Rooms and Corridors!
Vertex painted, meaning: All Rooms & Corridors share the same 4 layered texture file!
(49 prefabs, Bewteen 3-4 Lod Stages + Colliders = 275 individual Models!)

-> 28 Parts like bridges, ramps, pillars and such!
Vertex painted, meaning: All these share the same 4 layered texture file as the Rooms & Corridors!
(28 prefabs, Bewteen 4-7 Lod Stages + Colliders = 197 individual Models!)

-> 5 Cave Lamp Props you can use to ress up your scene!
(5 prefabs, Between 3-4 Lod Stages = 28 individual Models!)

-> 3 weird glowing Bonus Mushrooms!
(3 prefabs, Between 3 Lod Stages = 12 individual Models!)

-> 11 Tiling HDRP Textures + 2 layered texture mixes for the Cave Rooms (2048px)

-> 38 HDRP Textures for the 93 Dripstone Assets (2048px)

-> 7 Textures for water particles
(7 textures, unfortunally no animated particles. Because unity no longer supports the old shaders, so I need to learn the Visual Effect Graph first, but I figure I can include the textures in a first release for you to use.)

-> A really big and amazing looking Demo Scene


So if I did not forget anything, thats all in all:
181 shiny and new Assets!
937 individual Meshes! (Whew!)
I will do a more detailed breakdown when I am ready to release.


What still needs to be done before I can release:

- Currently building a big Demo Scene, to show of the assets and also so I can do a nice trailer.

- Trailer + Screenshots

- Making the project super tidy for you

- Actually figuring out how to release something on the Asset Store



I hope I can give you a release soon.

I am planning to release in the next 1-2 weeks.

Thank you for your time and interest! Hope you like it!
Best,
Simon

 

Some more pics!

 

@Malachistos , these look really cool! Will your asset still support the built-in rendering pipeline too? I like how you're modelling these after real cave formations, where as a lot of video-game caves look more like 1960s Star Trek sets.

 

Thank you so much! I tried to get them very natural looking.

Unfortunally no, the new pipeline requires a very different texture setup and generally has way more advanced shaders.
I myself can not write custom shaders, I tried with shader forge and such, but these always need to be redone with every unity update and such. The new HD shaders allow for vertex color blending (layering of materials) and support stuff like subsurface scattering out of the box. Which is just a brilliant feature to have.

In theory I could include textures for the old pipeline, but without shaders, prefabs and a demo scene it is pretty much pointless. (Not to mention I would get a lot of complaints from unsuspecting buyers)

So only the HDRP pipeline for now, sorry. ):

 

Some more work-in-progress pics from my demo scene:

 

Demo Scene almost done!
I have no idea how to get some light probes to not flicker on some models when the LOD changes from baked to light probe though. But that is not the fault of my assets. I have just no idea why light probes are so fiddly sometimes. Maybe the next Unity release has a fix for this.

 

Still working on a proper Trailer and Documentation.

Meanwhile here is THE DEMO SCENE FLYTHROUGH!

I am super proud of how it turned out! I hope you will like it too.

I recorded some audio a few days ago that will be included in the pack, as can be heard in the video:
Dripping effects, Water trickles, Streams and Waterfall sounds.

A word regarding particles... the particles you can see in this video will be included, however:
Due to unity 2019 NOT having shaders that handle particle transparency (color over lifetime modifier),
these are work in progress for now. The particles are working, but use the HDRP Lit shader for now, so they don't fade out. Color over lifetime is set though, so you can just replace the shader when available on the material.
I will try and update the pack once those Shaders are avaiable within Unity proper.

 

And the Trailer!:

 

Made a second Trailer!:

Going to upload it to the Asset Store tomorrow. Hopefully it works.
I read somewhere that this process may take 2-3 weeks for new Assets.

Will update here once it is on the store proper!

 

Hey again,

just letting you know, I switched accounts for this project.

I have had 2 Unity accounts, one for working on projects for other people, and one for myself.
Because I mainly use my own Account these days, I decided to do the smart thing and switch this project over to my main account before uploading anything to the asset store.

So if you have any questions, please pm me on this account. (Though I will try to check both sometimes.)

 

IT IS DONE!

Finally Released on the Unity Asset Store!
ENJOY! And let me know what you think!

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/dungeons/the-grand-caverns-dripstone-146468

 

The asset is amazing You put a lot of work into this...