Arbiter - Monthly Recap - February 2024

Greetings Readers!

Are you Ready to be Reborn? Reunited? Remade? Because I'm not! I've still gotta finish Re-Remaking before I can Rebirth so I'm scrambling to get this out so my entire Saturday doesn't Revolve around Remaking the same Reocks for the entire Remonth and if they keep Re getting in the way of my Regaming time then I think I might Really lose my ReMind  REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-

Arbiter: ReCap

I started the month pretty well, finding a nice solution to my floating island problem from January. The main thing I had to do was find a nice modular shape that worked for what I was building, but I also had to iterate on my texturing process a bit to find a style that worked for it. I got really hung on how reusable I wanted my materials to be, but I found for these more specific objects that it was better to just bake their details rather than throwing a seamless texture on it and calling it a day. The results weren't bad!

I'm gonna iterate a bit to make things less blocky, but ultimately I found that keeping the shape simple but reusable without looking too repetitive (and a decent texture on top) really helped lock things in. There's not much set dressing or anything yet, but I'm excited to go back in there and add some flowers, trees, stones, and tons of twisted branches wrapped around each island—much funner problems to solve.

I figured afterwards that since I was already in Rock Hell, I might as well keep the fire burning and move onto their big brother: the cliffs. Even with all my studies over the past year I haven't truly deep dived into making the cliffs look good, and it turns out they're pretty important!

The Cliff Arc

Games aren't infinite, and I think it's easy to overlook that one way or another, the playable space needs to be limited to the game's content (hence why we hate all those "empty" open worlds). Considering Arbiter's environments are primarily outdoors, one of the fundamental ways I'll be limiting that space is with lots and lots of big 'ol cliffs. 

As I mentioned, I haven't truly dove into making cliffs before so all my attempt up until now have been pretty half-assed. To put it bluntly, they looked like shit and didn't serve the game's aesthetic literally at all, so we got iterating!

These were some of my better (?) attempts, but they still weren't really hitting. The shapes were either too busy or too bare, with the repetition of the forms being way too obvious. A lot of the lessons I learned this month was about balancing model complexity with texture complexity, and ultimately what I settled on was that simpler models usually need more texture detail, and complex models need less (lighting does most of the work).

Unfortunately I couldn't really make the cliffs like the floating islands as they're too big for a single baked texture. The common solution for texturing large assets is instead to use a seamless texture alongside what's called a macro texture, so you have a combination of tiled details and more unique per-object detail. With modular enough assets, this can usually take you pretty far!

Still, it took me a long time to get there. To give a sense of how much iteration I did, those 6 attempts up there are probably about half of the styles I tried for that cliff model alone, and over the course of the month I made about 14 different models total. Once again, every time I closed my eyes I saw rocky surfaces cracking within the endless void of the Zbrush viewport, taunting my every brush stroke until I remembered a fundamental truth of this world: rocks are hard. 

Enter Cliff_Neo_14.fbx. If you're wondering what the _Neo is for, listen, sometimes you just have to proactively manifest your own success—even at the cost of being cringe. They couldn't possibly be bad if I called them Neo Cliffs, right? That name is simply too cool; their quality being bad would be an existential contradiction to the rules of nature. 

...and you know what? It worked! It only took 14 attempts 😃

This is where I'm at right now. I think I've found a process that works pretty well mechanically, doesn't take ridiculously long, and looks decent in-game. You'll notice there isn't any moss or set-dressing right now, just the cliffs, and I wanted to do that just to make sure they look good before I go in adding more detail. I also wanna try this method on some other shapes since I'll still need a healthy variety of cliffs for this level alone, so we're not done quite yet. 

The new art style, while super fun to work with, does have some limitations in that the environments for the game are technically cel-shaded. This means I lose out on a bit of detail when it comes to lighting information, which is why I had to try out so many different shapes. I found the style that worked best was about halfway between the super faceted look of hyper-stylized cliffs, and the more natural look of something more realistic. This gave me just enough detail for the lights to do their thing, while still keeping things pretty simple overall. 

I'm still iterating on their colour, smaller details, and overall lighting, but I can at least say that these are probably the best cliffs I've made up 'til now, and that feels pretty rad. I'm gonna see how they look with some set dressing and adjust everything accordingly, but as of right now I'm feeling pretty damn close to the proverbial "passable" state I've been chasing for so long. That said, I know how quickly eyes can adjust so I wouldn't be surprised if I wake up tomorrow and it looks like shit again. 

If that isn't the case however, then I feel pretty comfortable taking this process and grinding out the other shapes I need. Honestly, the iteration process was mostly just tough because I hadn't yet discovered how to make the cliffs look good with the new art style. Now that I have a better understanding of how to do that, I think I can start to be more targeted about just making what I need (hopefully). We'll see how it does!

2024 Rocks! 

In conclusion, I've been getting my ass beat this year ngl! I didn't really anticipate rocks being as much of a wall as they've been, but considering they're literally the in-game walls I guess the joke's on me. I'm happy to finally be getting somewhere though, and I hope the visual improvements are feeling tangible for you guys as well.

At any rate it's nice being able to sit down and finally figure this stuff out, so I appreciate everyone's patience and support in the meantime. Take care and thanks for the read!

Cheers,
Jordy