Rome: Truly AAA Quality Exterior Enviroment Pack for Unity

So... how many times have you said to yourself, "Rome wasn't built in a day!"

Very nice work here, really good looking stuff!

 

One more for the evening:



This decorative plate came out pretty well. I may have to do some more antiques

 

Love the amount of detail, truly AAA indeed! This is exactly what my game needs which is set in the same time period. Great work keep it up!

 

Oh, pots, I love those!

 

I would buy the pack just for the materials! Will they be available for us to use it our personal models or will they only be available for use on the included models? I am sure I will use both but I do like to match my stuff to asset store models the best I can via textures.

So beautiful.

 

There is a library of tiling materials that i"m using on architecture, walls, and floors that can certainly be used in other projects. Decals too. The props that are unwrapped, of course, have materials that are dependent on UVs.

 

Perfect!!

 

Today I did some blacksmith tools and I thought they would serve as a good post about the soft normals featured in the pack.

Typically, most environment content in the store is shaded with your basic smoothing groups with just a normal map on top; one that has no regard for the underlying vertex normal. As a result, you'll get hard edges which most art departments in game companies nowadays abhor.

With PBR, you want curvature to your normals so you can see the subtlety of the shading and reflection. The hard break from plain old smoothing groups won't let that shading continue nicely across the surface. And in VR? Well, no edge in real life is as sharp as what you can do in 3d and it instantly breaks immersion and presence.

In this image I'm blinking back and forth from normal map to no normal map. Notice all the nice subtlety created by the curved edges of the assets. Even the base of the wooden handles on the hammers look great.

Now it doesn't all have to be normal maps. For objects like walls or other architecture, you're not going to be unwrapping and doing normal map projections. For that, you'll give the edges a nice chamfer then run an area-weighted normals script that will maniupate all the vertex normals so you get a nice, smooth effect.

This image here, from earlier in the thread, has great examples of area weighted vertex normals. Notice the smooth corners on the blocks and the small door threshold on the far right.

 

Great, exactly how it should be done. Way beyond everything currently available in Unity in asset store.

 

Blacksmith shop getting some love. The tools came out really nice.

 

Very nice man ! Well done !

Any chance for a little breakdone of the substance ?
Like how you make the mosaic to tile so well

Cheers

 

I made some nice Roman/Greek pottery. 3 more pots to go.

 

One good urn deserves another.

 

You should go become king of this thread. ;-)

 

Amazing quality. I'm in awe and your narration of the behind the scenes how you generate this is really interesting to us hobby level artists.

 

Very nice work! Do you have an estimate for when this will be released?

 

Aiming for June! Things might happen, but that's my goal.

 

Hi Everyone,

I've developed an Asset Store survey that is aimed at helping my fellow publishers and I in better serving the Unity community. Would you mind taking 2 minutes and filling it out? It would be greatly appreciated.

The survey is anonymous and the results are available upon completing the survey.

http://goo.gl/forms/wkFlz7PSH9oIFH3l1

Thanks!

 

Unfortunately, I could not finish the survey. There were too many questions that forced me to make a choice of one or the other or when the answer for me at least was both or neither. Since I had to answer all the questions to leave comments, I was unable to complete the survey for you. Sorry. Because the answers are so black and white, I am not sure you are going to get accurate results.

I honestly thought about giving the answers I figured you wanted to hear just so you would keep developing great stuff, but then decided that was not very helpful. lol

Just to give my opinion though...not anonymous...I am willing to pay more for quality but I also love some of the assets that are not quite up to AAA standards. There are a lot of new game developers here who are just starting out, and the lower cost assets help them to make prototypes or even release a game....one that may have excellent mechanics even if the models are sub-par.

I wouldn't buy a Skyrim pack at any price, sorry. lol I don't care for the art style. Quality is a loaded word. It could either mean AAA, like your models or it could simply be a pack of models that are well formed and look good, and can fill in those cracks and crevices of your game. Quality is very subjective.

The price that people are willing to pay is even more subjective. I look at price and quality and balance the two. That was not a possible answer on the survey. I might pay $80 for a pack but I might wait until I actually am ready to put it in my game or until closer to releasing something. On the other hand I might pay $30 for some props now that I will need in the future. I might not pay $80 for something that I don't need, no matter how amazing.

Not sure I would pay $150 though for the same AAA pack. Even if a product is worth that much, it is out of our budget at the moment. Maybe someday...next game. Of course, buying AAA products might make all those other assets look shabby so I might even wait until there is enough AAA stuff to fill my game and upgrade my cheaper models or homemade ones.

So..sorry about the survey. I know you put a lot of time and thought into it but I felt I could not give an honest opinion using the survey. So..I gave it here.

I love your package and I do hope you get what you need from the Unity asset store to keep you here. If nothing else, you teach us how to reach for higher standards and it is something to aspire to, even among those who may have to wait.

 

I was in the same boat. There were just too many questions that didn't have an appropriate answer and a lot where my honest answer would have been a combination of the only two options listed. Always willing to give feedback if you want to hit me up in a PM though. Or if all of the *required stars could be taken off so we can skip questions that don't have applicable answers, I'll be happy to take another look at the survey.

 

Thank you both for the time and consideration for the survey. I've been publishing for several years now and the market is changing. I do this full time nowadays (big risk, I know) and I could use all the info and support I can get.

I completely understood before I made the survey that the answers are really contextual, especially those regarding sales. I do the same thing; I don't need it now, but I'd love to use it in the future. In the event of a question having potentially two answers, I wanted you to be forced to pick. Making sure the questions are useful to everyone is also a difficult balance; of course people want alot of sales and low priced assets, but someone like me that wants to make the best stuff in the store needs to find a balance. Hence, the survey

I disabled the required on the majority of questions. Some still have it but shouldn't be difficult to answer. It's possible to modify your responses too.

It's also worthwhile to mention that this isn't done. I will continue to poll people and responses can be modified. I certainly wouldn't want a single day's sample to dictate my courses of action.

Which questions were the most problematic and what could their answers be?

Thanks so much everyone!

 

What matters more to you? Price or quality. To me, it is a balance. So I can't really answer that question. I wouldn't buy a low quality item but nor would I pay too much money for a high quality one if that means I can't purchase other things I need. I just shut my eyes and pointed...lol.

I also cannot answer the "$35 and under low quality" or the "$65 and over high quality" question. I am not sure that the price always reflects the quality. I purchased a $90 pack of models once and was highly disappointed. I have bought $15 props and they were amazing. Besides..what about the medium quality, $35 to $ 65 bracket? I have some of those too...some are great, some are not so great.

The choice between high quality, frequently updated and med to low quality, updated only once...Honestly, the only models I have bought that were "high quality" according to Unity's standards at the time turned out to be never updated and useless to me now. So....how does one know that models will be updated? We were promised updates that never happened. Besides, what about medium quality that is frequently updated? That is more common it seems.

The rest was fine.

 

I would say the survey needs to be reworked. The first question had an easy answer, but it got hairy after that.

I'm interested in a lot of stuff, but I have to watch my pennies, so I'm one of those people who tries to buy wonderful things only when they're on sale.

 

Back to work!



Made a copper and wood trunk complete with the little locking mechanisms. I'll setup the prefab so it can be opened.

 

The top shot is from March where I had no materials or props created. Now, props are almost finished. I just have a hay bale to do to match up with that hay decal functonality I did.

Today was about making the clotheslines. They're flat planes with normal maps and ambient occlusion. They, and the shop canopies at ground level, have a vertex offset shader that moves the vertices according to the material paramters. It's like a nice wind effect and adds life to the space.

One that hay bale is done, it's on to assembling all the architectural prefabs.

 

I know I kept saying "bales" but hay bales weren't a thing until late 19th, early 20th century. So i did piles!

The piles are using that same depth biased alpha cutoff shader I'm using for all the decals. The piles though are a little more special. To get the hay to look more voluminous, I pulled out random vertices and set their alpha cutoff higher than the rest so that vertex would be transparent. The effect is the hay sticks are jutting out from the pile all around the pile. They're also blending out from the base too. It worked out so well I did two piles and a corner pile:

 

Oh man, what I would do to sit and watch you work. I've been learning substance painter and designer slowly through just making my own crafts but man, this stuff looks incredible.

If you ever find yourself in need of a desperately hardworking intern, I'll eat that opportunity up in a heartbeat!

 

Thanks for the complements! I am actually tossing the idea around of doing a Substance Patreon page this year. Patrons would receive substances, videos, lessons, tricks, tips, and maybe even some sort of live q&a lecture stuff. Sound cool?

 

Definitely! I have been eyeing several of your videos lately, bookmarking them for me and my artist daughters. Would love to see some lessons on using substances.

 

Not for me, as I buy in all my artwork (having no skills in that area myself), but I'd certainly like to see more assets of this quality on the store

 

I love the idea. I really do think substances are the future (for now) and am doing my damndest to get as skilled with it as possible.

 

ewwwwwww..



I need to do a mud material. By the way, this puddle is a shader. You can paint the wetness level with vertex color.

 

Gotta have somewhere for the poo to go

 

Update:



For those who want to get in a start placing buildings in the pack, I wanted to make it simple and flexible. So, when constructing the buildings, I decided to go with a floor-by-floor approach. Each floor will be its own prefab which you can then stack, rotate, etc.

As I went further into this, I realized I messed up. The repeated elements within each floor, and building, are not individually instanced. To the renderer and CPU, the windows from one floor to the next are unique. That's not ideal, so, uh, crap. For the quick buildings, I need to make the main walls unique, then place the individual elements as instanced meshed in the editor, making each floor a prefab.

The pros:
1. Unfortunately more draw calls, but better occlusion culling of assets. Rely heavily on occlusion culling in an urban environment like this.
2. Much less memory footprint due to all the instancing.
3. When I do LODs (later), it'll scale nicely.
4. Future variations of those modular pieces can be swapped in, easily making a prefab.
5. If you really want to get hardcore, you will be able to make your own architecture in the pack of any footprint. I'll be including the modular pieces I use to make all the architecture and will include some code to help some things along. With all that art, I may change the name of this series to "Rome Construction Pack" or something.. heh.
6. This method of building would allow the community to get involved in the future. I'd have to develop a way for people to create and share architectural setups with what I have planned. Definitely something to discuss in the future.

This will mess-up likely push the pack beyond the June release, which sux.

Oh and I know you might be saying, "wtf? All brick?!" but that's just the base material I use. There are quite a few materials you can swap in to change that.

 

Fabulous idea! The ability to use modular pieces makes this an even more attractive pack as well as the "hardcore" abilities. Thanks! I don't mind waiting.

 

The assetstore really needs this level of work, very inspiring - and yes! modular! Painting unique towns in max with automodeller and FFDs(or any quick deformer) would be so fast, then back into Unity where the materials should still look great

 

I appreciate the impulse to keep quality high and to take advantage of OC.

 

I dont think you messed up. This is typical clash, draw calls (unique meshes) vs frustum culling. If you have lots of small meshes, you can use advantage of frustum culling, if you have big complex meshes, you have lower number of drawcalls and you setup up oclussion culling in more efficient way (big mesh will easily oclude small ones). Solution heavily depends on your use case. In my team we are using following approach:

For LOD0, building is made is many from many small meshes, so when you are in close distance or inside, you take advantage from frustum culling. It is also flexible for designer, he can build building like from Lego. For LOD1 (distance where you can see whole building) we merge all meshes into one, we merge materials, decimate and do texture atlas, so we minimize drawcalls. For LOD2 we are using billboard.

Anyway I dont think, that your floor by floor approach is bad. Yes, walls and windows are not instanced, but this is very low overhead (walls and windows dont have much polygons and few drawcalls more, who cares). Majority of performance is lost on small "decorations". If you have enough kind of prefabs, it is also flexible and level design is fast.

Btw, in current games 2000 drawcalls per frame and 2 000 000 polygons in frustum are nothing and with DX12, drawcalls can go much, much higher.

 

Thanks for the feedback, l0cke, and thanks for being a loyal customer

Certainly with today's hardware, GPUs laugh at polygons. But, performance profiling is something I see many people struggling with. There are many factors that go into getting that framerate up, or memory consumption down. It's tough for ambitious asset store customers who are making their dream game suddenly have to come to a brick wall. I feel the need to be able to provide flexibility between those who go full speed into their game and those who tiptoe

That said, the new approach is yielding good results and is going faster than previously thought. Update forthcoming.

 

Performance profiling is up to customers. Every game is different and you cannot cover all needs. And who does not understand how to do such things will never ever complete anything. Problem with Unity community is, that overall knowledge is very low and 99,99% of Unity people thinks, that they dowload some plugins, buy kits (for $1, everything else is too expensive) and they will have game. And this is big mistake, you cant cheat that and without going deep down and understanding basic principles and actually learning how to do the stuff it is not possible to finish anything. Kits/plugins can speed up delivery process, but thats all. Cruel, but reality.

 

Old clay roof tiles are always a particular challenge in gamedev. I threw caution to the wind here. This is geometry. I'll likely taper the detail the higher the altitude, but I'm satisifed with the roof. It needs a trim piece to ground it. I'm basing it off this early prototype of mine:



I'm going modular here too, so you'll be able to fit your buildings with roofs of any size.

 

As soon as you release this, there will be so many games set in Ancient Rome.

 

These are lovely...but....I worry. If I buy your pack and my only chance are high poly roofs, that unless you are doing an action game with people jumping on roofs, they will barely be seen. I would love a choice of using lower poly roofs instead. I could make them myself, but will they go as well with your modular pieces?

 

Backing up what @Teila said, could a second set of prefabs be made with the roof corrugations being either normal or height mapped, or some sort of tessellation - anything to bring the poly count down to game ready? I too have to say these are stunningly beautiful, but polycount is a worry.

 

We are at 2016, polycount is no problem at all. You even dont know, how much poly it has and you are already complaining. QuantumTheory knows what he is doing, by far better, than 99,999% percent of people here. So wait for final result, then judge.
And if you think it has too much poly, use (create) LODs. Btw, parallax effect can be more expensive than polycount under some circumstances.

 

Some of us are making games where polycounts really do count, even at 2016 levels. I am not asking him to take out the roofs, but to give us options. Otherwise, the pack because less usable. If that is what he wants, then fine.

 

As I told before, no pack ever is directly usable for game. You must always do some tweaking according to your use case. So you need to have necessary skills. Pack can only save you some work, but thats all. You cant cheat lack of skills by buying it. If the pack is AAA, it is not meant for mobile and crappy PCs. If it is meant for mobile, it will never be AAA for PC, etc...So dont push author into compromises, because mix of cat-dog never works.

 

Okay, there is a big different between tweaking assets, which I absolutely agree. But..when the only roofs available for a pack of buildings is very high poly, then you must make additional roofs to match the geometry, it is much more difficult. When I buy models, I have every intention to tweak them but I at least expect base models that I can tweak. A high poly roof will need to be completely remade. I do not expect to buy a pack of models with parts that must be replaced.

But that is fine. I am beginning to realize that a well optimized game that someone without a super computer and graphics card is not meant to play these sorts of assets. While my computer would have no issue, the players we are trying to reach might have laptops or other non-gamer type systems.

So...that is fine. Enjoy.

 

Not wanting to be in an argument, but as a discussion about performance ...

If the camera is at ground level, a lot of city geometry will be culled by occlusion. Details seen at a distance will be simplified on polycount due to LOD levels.

If angled rooftops are created such that they have separate meshes for each slope, then whenever only one slope is visible the other will be occluded and not rendered.

If distant rooftop LODs are made with simplified polys (like a quad) but using the same materials as the close ones (i.e., no additional draw calls), won't they look pretty good while still keeping performance great?

So OC will likely be the main performance aid while at ground level, and LOD will become more important as the camera gets altitude over an expanse of buildings.

I'm not very experienced at this, but that's my understanding.

 

Excellent point, Hopeful.

LOD levels would be great since it would provide options. A flat plane with a texture for distance uses and high LOD for close up, such as standing on the roof, etc. would be fine. OC is great from the ground but not all views will be from the ground. The benefits of LOD's is that we can tweak our game and allow for quality settings.

Regardless, I am going to wait on this asset until I get some real feedback from users, especially those making actual games that can be played on less than super gamer systems. It is gorgeous though, but I get that it is not for everyone.