Painted isometric tiles

[Perihelion]

I'm experimenting with painting over rendered isometric tiles, since painting tiles is way faster than spriting them. Not only does starting with a render make them a lot easier to paint, it also hypothetically lets me snag the normal maps at some point so I can do dynamic lighting in-game as if the objects were still 3D.

This is what I have so far:

Spoiler: large image

I could make the tiles a lot more polished, but my goal is to churn them out as fast as possible, so I'm probably not going to. I think this is a pretty acceptable compromise between speed and quality. Feedback and suggestions welcome.

 

[Xilef]

Freaking unbelievable.

Very amazing stuff, I'm guessing you have an isometric box template in photoshop and you're just painting you objects onto that before testing in the scene?

Also, how do you plan on doing walls?

 

[Perihelion]

Thanks! Glad you like it. I laid out an isometric grid in Photoshop, but I'm not really using it. I set up an isometric camera in 3DS Max and rendered the models there, so it's just a matter of painting over them. On that note, archive3d.net has a ton of nice free furniture models I've been using. A lot of them don't come with textures or materials, but since I'm painting over them anyway, I don't care.

 

[Perihelion]

Oh, didn't see your edit. As for walls, I'm probably gonna do some tonight. It'll just be a rectangle with a baseboard and some crown molding stuck on. The reason I haven't done it already is that I couldn't find a good free baseboard model for some reason, so I might have to try making one, but my computer is terrible and I can barely run 3DS Max.

 

[Xilef]

Oh, didn't see your edit. As for walls, I'm probably gonna do some tonight. It'll just be a rectangle with a baseboard and some crown molding stuck on. The reason I haven't done it already is that couldn't find a good free baseboard model for some reason, so I might have to try making one, but my computer is terrible and I can barely run 3DS Max.

If I get home early enough tonight I can make you one in .obj format, sounds like a very easy job.

 

[Perihelion]

Thanks for the offer! I might take you up on that. But I'm potentially collaborating with a couple other people to make a bigger set of compatible tiles, so I might just get one of them to do it if I can't.

 

[Xilef]

I have one criticism of your choice to paint the objects, you said you could reuse the projected normal map from the models and apply it to real-time 2D lighting, however I see that you have some shadows draw into the objects already.

What I would do is paint the objects without the shadows but with some ambient occlusion left in, so the back of the chair and the side of the sofa would have the same lighting as the lit-side but keep the shadows in the corners of the objects, under those pillows and the ground shadow under the objects and the side of that fridge, that way you can use the normal map and 2D lighting to be wholly in charge of illuminating the objects, a more flexible lighting model reduces the amount of art that needs to be produced and reduces the content iteration time.

 

[Perihelion]

Yeah, I should probably do it that way. It would also allow me to flip objects horizontally, which would be really nice. I guess I sort of defaulted to doing it this way because it looked immediately nicer for test purposes and the lighting thing is still a vague pipe dream. Maybe I'll see if we can get the in-engine lighting set up so we can test it. Thanks for pointing it out!

 

[Xhukari]

Oh wow, that looks amazing. I love it! :D
You have a lot of skill... o.o

 

[Venetia]

Love it. I started to do something like this a long time ago. It's unbelievably faster to paint crap than pixel it, and honestly, most players of the game wouldn't even understand the difference or care about it :P

Plus it's easier to do higher resolutions etc.

I had a hard time planning out repeating tiles for conservation, though. When making sprites, check out Spriter (a program) -- it will help you not have to manually animate every tiny movement with its own totally-repainted frame.

I especially love how you took the care to make the floors kind of washed-out so the player can see the foreground objects better. A lot of people mess that up and game settings become confusing to look at.

 

[Perihelion]

Thanks, guys! Glad you like it.

Nice catch on the floor tiles, Ven; only another tile artist would've noticed. I'm using the same outline/shadow color for all the furniture to make it look unified, and I specifically avoided outlines and dark shadows on the floor tiles for that exact reason. Similarly, I didn't make my shadow color super dark so I'd have darker shades available for sprites if I want them.

Yeah, repeating tiles is a big issue. Since I'm using random models and my comp is too bad to edit them, a lot of the furniture doesn't fit neatly on a grid. I don't anticipate problems with floor and wall textures, though. It's easy to make painted things tile if you cut the texture into four and move the old corners in together, then paint over them. The edges already tile since they're the old middle, so you just have to touch up where the lines meet.

As far as sprites go, we're actually rendering animated models into spritesheets. We have some mix and match model parts, and we'll probably write some shaders to mimic a painted style. I'd like hand-painted sprites, but it's just not worth it, especially since they'll be pretty small.

 

[Xhukari]

I must say though, a stylistic, aesthetic choice, this route you've gone is a refreshing, highly effective change. I'd love to play a game with this style.

 

[Perihelion]

Thanks! We did some lighting mockups in Unity last night, and I gotta say it looks really promising! I'll post a screenshot if I can clean it up a bit. I think the dynamic lighting will really add a lot once we get it up to snuff. It's pretty surreal to see a flat plane with 3D lighting, though! Normal maps are magic.

 

[Xilef]

Normal maps are magic.

Not really.

Have you seen this youtube video of a 2D engine with per-pixel lighting and z-depth clipping?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6ISVaM5Ww

Unfortunately the guy developed it in XNA, however it still shows how per-pixel lighting on a 2D scene can really work, see at about the 5:00 mark when he moves a light around the roof of the building.
Check out his other videos too as he has a weather system for the 2D engine as well.

 

[Ellie]

Wow, I missed this. These are really nice and I'd definitely play a game in this style. Are you still working on this?

 

[Perihelion]

I'm still working on the game in question, although I haven't done any tiles since I made this thread. I'm waiting till I get a bit further along in development. Also, thanks!