The Rise of Dagon : Week of May 3rd devblog

It's been a really busy and productive week for me working on The Rise of Dagon!  I actually had to pick and choose my images to share and made some combined shots to I wasn't uploading 15 images or so :-)

So the first update is with the sculpting challenges I had last week I decided that I should definitely explore some other options.  One of the items really high on my 'must use' list is Substance Designer which I picked up on Steam sale 50% this last Christmas.

So I had purchased a very nice texture from the Unity 3D Asset store and brought it in to Substance Designer.

In here I am still very much a newbie with this tool but I was able to put together a basic substance, and add some grunge to the surface.  Once I was happy I then exported the substance file and as you see in the screenshot here I have some parameterized values I can use to adjust this substance in game.

Obviously as I learn the tool better I should get a lot more parameters to adjust but this was a really satisfying first use; and was not too difficult.

So next up we have a new dungeon door I created in Silo2.  I then used the texture I had modified in Substance Designer and tiled it, adjusted the parameters and came up with a very satisfying looking wall/arch texture.

I also designed the texture for this door using yet another new tool I had purchased on sale this week on Steam called  MindTex.   MindTex essentially takes your diffuse map texture and lets you generate normal, ao, specular (and other maps).  The results here are pretty decent.   Not as proper as they would be with a proper high poly bake of course; but I am trying to get some prototyping going -- these are not intended to be final assets!

 Next I created a low poly torch and wall sconce, and then actually used the MindTex again .. it turned out pretty nicely yet again and definitely saved me some time.

I did also try a high poly sculpt on the torch in Blender but I was not satisfied with the results; and after messing with it for the most of one evening I knew I had to move on and try something else so the MindTex approach was definitely welcome.

Next up I finally experienced what I would call a success in using Blender 3D to sculpt an object and generate useable maps out of it in the end.   I needed a dungeon ceiling and created a low poly ceiling segment in Silo2 and then sculpted it in Blender 3D all in one evening!

 As you can see the sculpt itself is not incredibly detailed but I wasn't willing to spend more than one evening when I was not sure how it was going to turn out and as I've mentioned before, I'm in rapid prototyping mode here!  So we see below the dungeon ceiling texture map bakes i was able to do in XNormal after exporting the high poly .obj file from Blender 3D.

And finally we have our crowning achievement for the week .. the new and much improved dungeon hallway with  substance based texture, low poly door, low poly torch and sconce and a very nice fire particle I purchased in the Unity 3D asset store :

I'm really pleased with the look and feel here, I'll be doing a few more items to be able to form the architecture I want for my prototyping but I definitely feel like I'm on track now!

Tell me what you think about the progress and screenshots this week?