Just a quick look at what I have done so far since undertaking a refresh of the Overworld.
Here is the original set of screens.
Here they are from the same exact perspective but rendered in 3D.
And from a 3/4 Perspective.
And from another angle.
And the original inspiration for this, the little image from the manual showing this section of the overworld.
Good evening!
Again, continuing work on the overworld in preparation to pull screens into Unity to show of a walk from the start screen to the first dungeon.
Yesterday and today, screens 8I and 7H have been rendered. These are two screens adjacent to the starting screen.
Below are shots of 8I, 7H and 7I.
Original 8I:
8I Grass, Tree and Bush placement. Using the original screen to ensure placement is proper and scaled.
Textured with the High Res green mountain and cracked dry dirt.
Top Down Comparison of 8I
Screen 7H Original
Original on the 3D Model
Placement of the stones on 7H, using the original screen.
A render after placement of the stones.
Top Down comparison:
Screen 7I Original:
Original Applied to the model
Placing the props…
and painting where underbrush will be randomly distributed by “weight painting” for the particle system. Here the dead grass is already placed and this is for the living underbrush.
Here is an angled shot from near eye level.
An angled top down
And finally, the original side by side with the new version of screen 7I.
Been continuing work in Blender gathering all my props, organizing, renaming and setting up materials etc for ease of import into Unity. Here are some screen shots.
Dead Areas: Dry Grass
Some of the small dead grass that can be found in dry/dead environments (Mainly western Hyrule) Leaves there will be used as forest floor coverage in this area too.
Dead Areas: Dead Trees and Bushes
In the game, all the brush and bush seems the same, the small round shrubs. Taking some liberty to add variety to the environment. Keeping it all in the proper places though will have screen shots of that later down the road and my approach to ensuring objects are in the correct spots compared to the original game.
Mountain Areas: Red Rocks
These are the stones you will see throughout the mountains of Northern and Western Hyrule.
Hills and Plains: Living Grass and Flowers
A variety of grasses and flowers found throughout the southern and eastern plains and hills of Hyrule.
Hills and Plains: The Forest
As with the Dead bushes, the living bushes in the original game all use the original sprite. With this version, I will be using trees and bush throughout the areas.
Hills and Plains: Green Rocks
These stones are found throughout Hyrule in the plains and other areas. I have always pictured them as moss-covered.
Graveyard: Headstones, Skeletons, and Coffins
A variety of props for the Graveyard of Western Hyrule. A few of these I need to look into why they are rendering nearly black, need to check my nodes in Blender. I know they look fine in Unity, already tested there. Updating the graphics on these to use Hylian Font and actually have some little words on the stones.
Samples of the Start Screen.
Top Down:
Angle 01:
Angle 02 (Close to the Ground, Facing south from the north screen entrance.
The next screen , 8I.
Here I have added a group of objects for the underbrush. The original screen is being used as the temp texture so I can properly place my trees and bushes.
LOZ Project – Overworld Setup Documentation Screen Shots Included in this Document…
Exporting a massive map from L3DT. This is the program that I took the B&W map I made from an actual game map and hand sculpted the mountains and such to keep the definition of the outline of each screen. This map has an extra screens worth of terrain around the edges, so it is 18 by 10 screens. It was interesting getting the output file from L3DT to the proper size to keep the aspect ratio of the overworld.
Each in game screen is 16 tiles by 11 tiles. This is a 1.45:1 ratio. I have the individual screens sized out at 512 * 353 pixels, which keeps the 1.45:1 ratio.
18 screens across is 9216 pixels, 10 screens high are 3530 pixels. I am hoping that this size will allow me more detail in the individual screens, the dips and detail I wanted to be much finer than it was when I tested motion in Unity. The map I am using now is nearly four times larger than the original I had made.
I then split the main image up into the individual screens (180 of them!) using the site http://imagesplitter.net/.
Now the individual screens can be loaded into Blender for editing.
The image to load will be the original screen texture file. The material we create will be called screen Original.
Resize the plane that was imported. Set the location to 0,0,0. Keep the same scale 1.45:1, I went with 145 X 100 units. Apply the scale with CTRL+A while the plane is selected.
Set the Render mode to Cycle Render.
Change to TEXTURE View and you can see the image on our plane.
Next, we need to subdivide the surface. Press TAB to change to EDIT MODE. Select “Subdivide” from the sidebar on the left, under the “Tools” tab.
Edit Mode, 45 Cuts, Object Mode, Edit Mode, 4 Cuts. Leaves with 105,800 Tris for the screen.
Rename our plane to the screen ID.
Since we imported the Original Texture version of the image, this material is already setup and good to go for use as the original texture.
To make the displace texture available, we need to add a Displace modifier.
Now go to the TEXTURE tab and create a new DISPLACE texture.
Add a New image. Find the heightmap. Name the displacement texture screen HM.
Under IMAGE MAPPING, set the Extension to Clip.
Because we setup the new texture as a Displace, it has automatically populated in the modifier.
Set the Coordinates for the texture to UV, strength to 100
The imported screen. (No Texture)
Texture Applied
We will go ahead and texture with an original map screen initially, to make certain things are lined up and that when we place brush and trees, cut out caves, etc. we will have things in the right spot.
In UV EDIT MODE, create a new texture image.
Name this screen High Res. Set the resolution to 8192 X 8192. Set it so you can see a UV grid.
We need to setup a new material for our high res texture.
Name the new material screen High Res.
Setup the node as a Diffuse BSDF, select the newly created screen High Res image with the UV Squares as the image. See below for node view.
To get this new High Res material to show as the current texture, you will need to use the minus sign to remove the screen Original material. It can be added back on later.
Enter Texture Paint Mode.
Under Tools, on the left bar, there is a TEXTURE section. Add a new one.
If you click the “New” button, a brush texture will be created. Go to the TEXTURE tab to edit it.
Rename the brush from Texture to what you need it to be. Press “Open” so we can navigate to the image we need.
Now that the bush has been made, click the area in Textures, under the tools and select the bursh. You can now paint the texture directly onto the model.
Set to random for good mixing. No need for tiled texture!
If it is not painting on angles for some reason, you need to set the scaling! A step was forgotten!!
Fwwwwwww
Finish your painting.
Save the image so the texture you just painted is saved over the UV Squares.
On a new layer, we are going to create the grass that will be used in our particle groups.
Create a pair of planes and cross them perpendicularly intersecting. Join the two objects, normalize the scaling and unwrap it.
Set the orgin to the base of the object. In the UV editor, open a grass blade to use.
Get it so both planes cover the grass properly, centered. Rotate as needed.
Setup the node for the material as follow:
I have saved five types of dry grass to layer two.
Rendered
Group all of the objects together. Select them all and press CTRL+G. This will highlight them in a green border. Go under the Object tab and you will see a new group.
Name the group what you need it to be.
Edit Mode, select the area that we want to paint with grass.
Under the Object Data tab, the Vertex Groups, create a new group and give it a name.
Go into weighted paint mode and you can see how much of the particle will go where. Red is much, Blue is None, green and yellow are in between.
Under the particle tab, after selecting the terrain, you will want to setup your new system.
Name is what you want.
Grass tends to place sideways. Need to set Rotation and put Random to zero and Phase to 0.500.
Check the Physics. If things seem too small, make certain things are as follows:
Next we need to tell the system what objects we will be using for the particles.
Under Render, from the particles tab, select the Group button and select our grass group we created on layer 2.
Now we tell it where to place the objects. Under the Vertex Groups section, select the vertex group we created earlier. This is for DENSITY.
Now the grass is placed only where we want it!!
Legend of Zelda Project: 