AV - Asset Design, Marketplace.

To top the day off and give the blog a little bit more attention, I want to showcase some of the assets I have been working on. Originally I was working on a more complicated asset for 2 hours every week, however I recently decided to get a lot of the smaller assets out of the way first, as I was finding myself slowly chiseling away at the intended asset list and not having much to show for it. Texturing is still quite a way off, and a lot of these assets are still in a whitebox state.

The busiest, most populated level in the project will be the marketplace, which will require a lot of small assets, and a few of these I would like to show off in a blog post!

Please bear in mind for the time being these are untextured save for one or two of the assets.

Seconded to Crates, Barrels are an easy way to flesh out any level in almost any setting. Many games will have these be destructible or contain loot, but I'm afraid given the nature of my project I'd much rather have them be something to look at instead of white background space.

The ingots I am glad I did early. The original model for this is just one raw untextured ingot. What I have here is actually IngotStack_003. Not only can you layer several of the same asset atop one another to make stacks, but the ingots can also be made of different materials. This is simply a colour rather than a texture to visualise a bronze ingot. There can be steel, silver, gold, and a bunch of fancy fantasy ingots like blue mythrite, an opal coloured adamantium, or even simple bars of copper or iron. Having this one asset will prove very valuable in giving a lot of diversity to the assets present in the marketplace.

How do you get these from the shop to the market? With a Cart! There won't be any wildlife present, so far as story design goes it would fit the theme somewhat well to have these peddled by people rather than animals. And similarly to the ingot, you can stash anything inside of these. Given that the game is top down, I can foresee this asset giving me a lot of trouble trying to show what is hidden away inside. When designing the cart I had a similar thing in mind with Ingots, and having one basic asset that can contain different assets to make it feel more vibrant and alive.

Crates! There's really nothing special to say about crates, the blog standard world filler, every universe can always use more crates.

The texturing for this stall isn't ideal, but I quickly slapped some .png textures on it to try and simulate what it would look like in the finished project. Texturing is still quite a way down the line.
As mentioned with the cart, this will also give me a few problems unless I only have these stalls facing the camera, as the fabric covering the roof of the stall will obscure the view. It may also not seem it, but when the default unreal guy is imported to 3ds max, this stall gives him a few inches of room above his head, and is sort of to scale. Whether this remains to be true when I import it from 3ds to Unreal has yet to be seen.

Time

Now that there are some visual assets out that I can show, the next AV post I want to be on audio. It's an area that has given me a lot of trouble, so perhaps I will have another 3D post before audio. Before the end of the month I want to have a small library of foley sounds, and have started on a soundtrack. Coding is a lower priority for the time being, but I also want to be at a point where I can start working on the core mechanic by the end of the month.