So how the hell did I build this on my own in a few weeks. It's all down to technicality. For the first three weeks of the project, where I was concepting ideas, I was learning about something called photogrammetry. That basically just means making measurements from photographs which doesn't sound all that interesting. Then if you imagine these measurements could be converted into something that could be used for a game, like a mesh. Well, that's exactly what it does. Below is a head I scanned from photos. If you hit the 3D button on the bottom left you can look around it. It's just a head, yes. But think of the possibilities of how much easier it is to get accurate and unique models with so much less work involved. I'm not by any means telling you it's as easy as taking a photo to get a perfect mesh, it's not. It just allows for an accurate base mesh of which you can use. It does not render traditional modelling obsolete.
If you manage to get a decent scan, you have to retopoligise the mesh and bake the normals and diffuse if necessary. When these models come straight from the camera shall we say, they're around 500,000 triangles plus. Which isn't healthy for a game engine to run. Here's the head sitting at 1000 triangles in engine.
Like I said before, the possibilities are endless as long as you can figure out how to use it. I mentioned baking the normals; Because the original scanned mesh is to dense every inch of detail is modeled, hence the high poly count. Therefore baking a normal map from it is ideal. As an example, here's a marble head I made. The first image is the model with the baked normals from the scan. The second is without the normals. The difference is pretty ridiculous.
What both of these examples didn't show you were the diffuse baking. If you're getting models from photos it's pretty much default for them to come with colour on them, you're taking a photo after all.
And if you bake the normals and the diffuse maps onto the lower poly model that you made. Well, it all starts to verge on realism.
When playing games, beyond any kind of creative direction or poly count, the thing that pulls me out of the experience the most are the textures. Below is a screenshot from Skyrim. And the texture resolution is awful. But there's a legitimate reason for that. It had to run on older consoles which have about half a gigabyte of ram. Most of your ram goes towards rendering textures. My Alice based game doesn't have to run on a console. It'll run on high end PCs. And if it doesn't run how you want it to, get a better PC or knock down the texture resolution. See, all of my textures have micro textures over them. So no matter how close you get, the resolution will still hold up. I like to think of it as seeing the atoms.
You can just keep zooming and zooming.
I'll talk about lighting later on in the week when I get a chance. Until then, here's a few paintings I've done during the past few weeks.
Thanks for reading.
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