Rome: Truly AAA Quality Exterior Enviroment Pack for Unity

@l0cke So I hunted down the official word on this from UE4. It seems you can use items from the UE4 Marketplace in Unity without issue, EXCEPT when it comes to items that have been freely distributed by Epic themselves, such as their free content packs.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/unr...ace-faq-and-guidelines?69402-Marketplace-FAQ=

Q: Can I use marketplace assets in engines other than the Unreal Engine?
A: Yes, you can use purchased Marketplace content in engines other than the Unreal Engine. The only exception is any content offered for free by Epic, such as the "Open World Demo Collection" or our tutorial resources.

 

Indeed, same it is with Unity (and Unity demos...).

 

Thanks for all the kind words everyone. RFP2 is indeed the best artwork I've ever done, and that includes my time in the industry.

After this though, I will finally begin my solo game dev career, namely a VRRPG. I'm currently developing all the environments for Redemption's Guild, but I also plan on developing my own game this year.

 

Great news, QT! Good luck to you in your new endeavors.

 

Pretty psyched about the possibilities with this wall paint shader! Check it out.​

 

Really cool! I can already think of ways to use that. Thank you, Peter!

 

I've a small test room to test out lighting, measurements, etc. inside Unity.

I noticed that if I do interiors using my exterior pieces, which I expect people to do, my measurements are a bit off. I need to diagnose precisely the issue and make some geometric corrections.

Also, notice the dynamic light leaking due to dynamic shadow biasing. I'll have to make exterior roof pieces for these domed interior roofs. I had to toggle everything 2-sided to clean most of it up but it didn't get everything. The perils of doing exteriors and interiors in the same world ..

The decals are probe-lit and should always be. In Unity, you can override the probe sampling position per mesh. Probe-lit stuff is always touchy..



Oh and yea that animated particle fire is in the pack too It looks great

 

It's been a week of polish. Nice fat snowstorm where I lived today but that doesn't keep me from working away.

This is the part of the project I most enjoy but fritter my time away tweaking materials..



This is a test of a completed building with interior. You may notice this isn't a Domus. I managed to make the exterior wall pieces modular enough to also be used on the interior sides too. Modularity for the win.



This pack is heavy on the decals since Rome is all about those classical details and fresco illustrations. I put some on the front and side of this building and it's working for me!




Fans of Rome Pack 1 may also notice that brick wall is from the pack, but the color is different. That's the Paint shader I showed in the youtube video above.

 

Hi QT, I’m looking to upgrade my VR Roman town experience, and wanted to use your amazing work in place of my rather amateurish Sketchup plus textures effort. Have you done any tests using the full package vs the mobile pack? It’s a relatively small area - maybe 50 buildings max, and I can impose occlusion culling, although I may allow a fly mode which will expose most of the buildings at once - should still hide a lot of the props if they are all separate meshes though. Are there LODs in the mobile pack to help with that?
I was also after some thatched roofs, as this is a rural town, rather than a city, is there anything I can use for that? Also one circular building?
The hardware is very recent top spec Alienware (e.g. GTX1080). Any other advice gratefully received. Thanks!

 

>Have you done any tests using the full package vs the mobile pack?

Yes. If you're aiming for mobile platforms, pick the Rome Fantasy Pack for Mobile as everything is setup and optimized to run great there.

>...should still hide a lot of the props if they are all separate meshes though.

A blanket answer isn't really going to help since the space isn't built. It all depends on how you arranged and built the scene. The pack isn't low detailed enough to see 50 buildings from the air and have it perform well on mobile devices.

>I was also after some thatched roofs, as this is a rural town, rather than a city, is there anything I can use for that?

The roofing is terracotta for both Rome packs.

>Also one circular building?

Sorry. I don't have circular buildings.

 

Thanks for your reply. Have you tested either pack in VR?

 

Yes. If you're doing mobile vr, you want the mobile pack. Otherwise, choose the desktop one.

While I don't have a Unity VR build, I made one in Unreal that you can play right now:

http://www.qt-ent.com/rome-fantasy-pack-vr/

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

 

Shot of the interior!

 

*sigh* I really overdid it with this pack.

 

Shouldn't it be "of AN interior" just to stop people thinking there's just the one?

 

That's what happens when you like your job.

 

In the demo, there is one interior but you can make multiple with the parts included.

 

Ok guys! Care to test the playable demo for me?

http://www.qt-ent.com/PlayableDemos/RomeFP2/RFP2_Demo_Unity.zip

Yes, I'm very close to release and quite psyched. I've tangled with Unity's whack-a-mole lighting system for the past 7 days and designed a map that I think showcases Rome: Fantasy Pack 2's capabilities. If you could give it a try, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Note that like RFP1, this is a Triple-A pack, if not moreso.. Many of the surfaces are parallax-enabled unlike the RFP1 demo, so machines with integrated graphics processors (Intel) will probably have a bad time. Don't worry though; all that stuff can be swapped out for standard-like shaders in the pack.

Once again, thank you all for your support the past..2 years, I think! You're the best.

 

Wow, I'm blown away with how good this looks. (I love the fingerprints on the wood)

I found a few things that might need some improvement. Most of the decals have some flickering at certain angles. I could easily reproduce the ceiling decal flickering just by looking straight up.

https://i.imgur.com/T8VriAk.png
https://i.imgur.com/f4qlWbn.png

Something seems off about this? maybe the normals?
https://i.imgur.com/gxpS2zz.png

This image looks like some of the alpha needs a touch up
https://i.imgur.com/godGhAa.png

Anyways, amazing work!

Edit: Also, it looks like the "Aging" examples aren't hooked up to the right shader property. From your example it seems like keys 6,7,8 were supposed to demonstrate the aging, but those keys were just setting different colors.

 

This looks amazing! Great work!

 

I bet contact shadows and volumetric light would really make that pop.

 

I struggle with decals in Unity. The shader's depth offset works 85% of the time. I'm half tempted to do it like I do in UE4: bias the vertex offset by camera distance. Ugh. There's another annoying z depth artifact I noticed that I can't fix, so I may test the vertex offset.

I see what you mean. There's a point light in front of the door which is probably in an undesirable spot. I don't think it's needed.

Thanks for spotting this.

I'll change the wording of the text then. I'd prefer to demonstrate the aging in a video. Thanks so much for testing!

 

I also see the decal z-fighting on the ceiling tiles, but only when I look straight up.

For your fresco overlays are you using these as deferred decals (writing to individual deferred buffers) or are they overlays? I've been considering doing special deferred decals for one of my upcoming art packs, but am afraid it would really limit the customer base... despite being superior graphically.

This second Rome pack looks awesome, congrats!

 

I'd much prefer people come to that conclusion on their own! SSS and Volume light certainly would make things pop. I considered it and tested it but felt that showing off stuff that's not included in the pack would be a letdown for customers who dove in and found out the truth.

Thanks!

 

Nope. They're just using the depth offset parameter in the shader.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-CullAndDepth.html (scroll down to Offset)

This way, you can render the scene in forward rendering if you need to do VR + MSAA. You might want to check it out. Or, do the hacky thing I mentioned earlier: bias the vertex offset by the distance of the vertex normal to camera position.

 

Screw Unity, there will be always issue like this with this engine, so just upload it to store, so we can buy it

 

hah! I fixed most of them anyways. I'd like to make some videos first, then i'll post it! Shouldn't be more than a couple days.

 

Fabulous! I love everything about it and cannot wait to build my city. Thank you so much for creating this beautiful package, Peter. The walls, floors, frescoes, ceiling tiles....all those textures, are worth buying even if one is not building Rome.

 

Also, thanks for this. I remember my early Unity days buying some popular Asset store developer's pack only to find out that without all the fancy shaders and post processing effects, it was really not very good. Back then, it was an expensive pack and most of it was not usable with the current Unity Free version. Sad.

 

Sorry, didn't mean you should include those FX. I meant that it would look better once *I* include those FX in my own project.

 

Then I'd say mission accomplished

 

Well thank you Teila for subscribing to this thread for soooooo long and being awesome. It's a great little group we have here. Yes, you can certainly add style and flair to any ol' fantasy project with the options available.

 

Your products are worth it, Peter. I have also enrolled in some of your Udemy classes and purchased at least one texture tutorial for my artist daughter. Your support of the indie community has been awesome as well.

I hope you will keep us all posted here on your endeavors and let us know when the games you are involved in are released. Do you have an account on places like Art Station so we can watch as you make awesome stuff?

 

Of course!

https://www.artstation.com/qtheory

I'm currently in preproduction on a game of my own and I'll definitely keep people here in the loop. Thanks!

 

I'm very impressed in the quality of the demo. I have used your first pack in building much of an ancient near east city. I look forward to building the palaces and official buildings with this new pack. Keep in touch with us and best wishes with your future projects!

 

It's out! Grab it while it's hot, folks!

​

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/landscapes/rome-fantasy-pack-ii-111712

I'll update the front page of this thread shortly. In the meantime, you might also be interested to know that RFP1 is 30% off during this release timeframe. Both packs are unparalled for their quality and artistic options.

Thanks for all your support! I look forward to seeing what you make! Be sure to drop some screenshots here and on social media!

 

Congrats!

 

What does contain channels of _mat files? R metalness? G ambient oclussion? B ? A rougness?

 

Red = metallic
Green = AO
Blue = height
Alpha = smoothness

 

Congratulations on the release!!! Between this thread and the SineSpace developer skype channel (they're switching to discord server, btw, lemme know if you need that link), I've been following along with your progress for I think a year now, if not longer. The detail is incredible, I couldn't help but splurge and grab both packs (for those who may not have noticed, volume I is on sale right now). I'm looking forward to using it to build a personal region in SineSpace, and then maybe some larger public spaces for people to explore.

 

Good to know. I though height is A in _normal file. So what is A in _normal file?

 

Alpha in normal maps is typically discarded due to BC7 compression. So, if there is an alpha in there, ignore it since Unity will deal with it.

 

Thanks @trilobyteme !

Sine Space has a lot of potential. If you would, spread the word on the skype channel! I had to exit because it lags my skype client too much. Yes! I do need that discord link!

 

The SineSpace skype groups are being deprecated, I believe (and I couldn't stand Skype either).

A couple months back they got an xmpp chat gateway set up, so the 3 main chat channels in-world could be reached through most xmpp chat clients that can do group chats (here's a blog post with info & instructions), and then in the last month or so they also got a discord server going - Discord Link

 

I've updated RFP2's webpage with some key reference images I used in its production. People have used writings and other archaeological information in an attempt to recreate what the Roman homes looked like and why. I hope people take a look at RFP2 years from now and use it as a immersive benchmark.

http://www.qt-ent.com/rome-fantasy-pack-ii/

 

First congratullations for excellent kit. Anyway I have one technical remark. Prefabs are quite often made from more meshes, which seems like good idea to be infinitelly modular, but in reality it will only have performance impact (typical example is Basewall. It is made from two meshes + decal, but it will be always used in one piece). Number of objects has huge performance impact on CPU and having prefabs from more meshes will cause serious CPU overhead in scenes with several thousands of objects. So it makes more sense to merge it into one mesh, because no level designer ever will experiment with these "sub prefab" meshes and try different combinations (If you have to build 20 big scenes during one year, you dont have much time to experiment, also nobody except author have in memory all meshes, so does not know about possibilities). In big scene having 5000 vs 10000 meshes is HUGE difference, even if they are HW instanced. There is CPU overhead like checking visibility for each piece etc.

This is always big dilema, modularity vs number of objects. In reality, only author of kit understand properly, what are possibilities of the kit and how it should be used. Level designer takes kit and use it in totally different way, than it was meant I prepared many kits for my level designers and at the end I was always surprised, how they used it. So I had to diassemble the scene and do serious performance optimizing by various mesh merginging, etc...And you can 1000x tell them, how to do it properly, but artists have their own heads So lesson learned from this is give them some modularity on texture and decal level, but not on mesh level. Give them already merged pieces, they will never ever use some smaller parts and it saves tons of time when optimizing final scenes.

 

There are tools out there that allow you to merge the meshes. They work well. Better than giving up the modularity of this asset.

 

My point was, that this is level of modularity no one will ever use and merging of meshes is additional work (sure, can be done, but it is extra work). This is experience gained by years in game development. Years ago I was also preparing mega modular kits, but it was pointless. If you are used to prepare scenes with several hundreds objects, my argument is not valid. But once you start to produce real games with millions of objects, this starts to be issue and prefabs made from many meshes are pain in the ass and have to be reworked.

 

Load up the Layout scenes. The workflow is to layout the meshes and use the included Mesh Combine script to put things together how you want them. Buildings go from 100 meshes down to 4-8.

And the cost of a few extra button clicks to combine meshes is the infinite layout possibilities available to level designers. Or, I could assume you want 5 buildings and publish the pack without them. Or, you can certainly find other Rome packs but it's likely they won't cater to 90% of peoples' use case.