Adding a color theme and figuring out your art style seems to be one of the most indecisive process of game development, I was kinda stuck most especially in the texturing aspect. I was really tempted to import free-textures and just merge them to my 3d-mesh.
I created a concrete wall material within unity and tried it out on the first building but I quickly realized that I was falling for the same mistake I made in my earlier attempts with this project.
I realized that the building would start to give a floating look and not merge properly with the game environment and character.
I even tried to experiment with the poly brush tool with a custom shader but the environment didn't blend well with my character model.
So I decided to just go back to the basics and use flat colors while incorporating the vertex coloring tool. It basically involves selecting the vertex point and adding color values to it. The vertex color values blends in with the base flat-color and gives some sort of simplistic cartoon painting.
You can also use vertex coloring to edit the color of the mesh-edges. Vertex coloring really helps to shade the contrasts of the mesh, as you can see there is a clear difference between the result below and the one above.
With enough tweaking, you can have something like this below. Vertex shading also really helped me define the road. Dusty roads paths is textbook trait of west-african roads lol...
I actually had a bit of fun tweaking the environments now that I've gotten the hang of vertex coloring. If I subdivide my meshes, thereby increasing the poly count and vertex points, there is a chance it would even look more better, but I don't want to go crazy yet lol... simple is better. for now... I just want to see how the scene turns out on the screen.
I also had added electric power-lines to the scene to further define a typical Nigerian street xD. In the end, it was starting to look familiar to what I know as an urban-Nigerian environment. I would still keep tweaking it though. This is how it would look on a phone screen.
This is the first street tile that is gonna be spawned and re-spawned throughout the game, I guess my next step is to work on the sky-box, maybe make it dusty, yellow-looking and sunny to further add to the "Nigerian-effect." Join me next time as I talk about the sky-box. thanks for your time :-)
check out my former episode here:
SETTING THE SCENE - MY PROPER INTRODUCTION TO THE PRO-BUILDER TOOL
