"The Zone" Blog 07: Milestones and Vertex Colors
Entry posted by DaveLee ·
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Hello again, programmers, artists, and game designers! Today's blog update will be a smaller one, with a much larger update on the way soon. Today I'm going to talk briefly about one way to utilize vertex color when texturing an asset, in this case a building, and then share some images of the Zone beta milestone from the end of May.
Those of you that downloaded the R5 version of Leadwerks 3.32 are already familiar with my derelict garage model. For this model, I initially used a single main texture for the concrete floors and the base of the building. It tiled well, and had some nice detail in the diffuse and normal maps. The problem I faced was that because it tiled so well, when viewed across the building it appeared very flat and boring, even with ambient occlusion.
To help add some visual interest to this base texture, which covers much of the building and the player's viewing area, I decide to utilize vertex colors and a second texture. My plan was the create two versions of the concrete base texture, one clean and one dirty. They would share the same normal map, saving some texture memory. Here is a look at the textures:
And here is how I laid out the vertex colors:
And finally, here is how it looks in game after adding the vertex colors:
If you've taken a look at the garage in game for yourself, that means you've probably explored the beta version of The Zone a bit as well. Here are some screenshots of that beta version that feature a bit more detailing work:
With only a few assets remaining, this project is rapidly coming to an end now. If you look around at some of the Leadwerks banner images, you may see some glimpses of my next blog post, which has a lot of new material that I'm very excited to share!
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