Game Level Design I 3
What I like most in a game? Ambiance ( Wipeout is a good example). Sometimes the game is quite weak or dumb, but there's "something" that keeps you "hooked".
Let's start the patient and somewhat precise "ambient" work in our poor game scene cube.
I'll show here a "fast" way of "graphics level improvement", good for people who don't want to spend much time with this task. Much more can be done ( I'll explain all these techniques in a deeper way in the next tutorials).
Add a Lamp to your scene and place it inside the room mesh in the top central area. Select the room object, assign to him a light brownish material, do Alt-Z in 3D window( verify in the Edit panel if the Sticky, VertCol, and TexFace have "Make" visible), press the V key then W key, a pop-up message will appear that you should accept, and then, press V key again. Now your scene in the 3D viewport presents some shades of brown. If you press P to enter Game mode, you can notice that your room is allready colored and lighted. Nice function.
If you're not happy with the results, press the "delete" button in face of the VertCol one in the Edit panel and add more lamps or move them or change theyre colors and redo the steps above.
My intention is to simulate the daylight that comes from a hole in the ceiling.
Repeat the procedure for the columns objects.
Now that we've the global shading work done, we can apply textures to our object, in this case, only three, a basic 256x256 tileable soil, brick and stone JPG's that you'll find easily on the WEB.
Load it in the UV Editor and do F to enter Face Select mode and do a basic UV texture work...well, select opposite side faces ( image above), in Side view, do U, and choose "From window" in the pop-up menu. Redo the same operation for the others side faces. To get the same texture porportions, select one opposite side face and allign the faces ( scale and move, red lines in the image above) in the UV window.
Select all the ceilling faces and apply the same rock texture ( "from window) in Top view). Do the same for the floor with a soil texture.
To simulate the sky ( image above) select the top faces, press V key to enter Paint mode, choose a light blue color in the color selector ( Paint panel) and press the Set Vert Color button.
To apply textures rapidly to the columns, select each column vertices, load a brick or stone texture, do U and choose "Cube" in the pop-up menu. In the UV Editor you can scale or move all the vertices to get some interesting results.
If you enter Game mode your scene should look more or less like the image above. Not bad, but with a little amount of extra work we can add a nice touch of "mistery"?!
Let's say that our goal here, it's to get a quite realistic castle scene. So, where are the image "problems"?
Well, the light of a sunny blue sky, came from the top ( 1), so the hole faces ( 2) must be the most lighted ones. The room ceilling ( 3) must be quite dark, to accentuate the lighted areas and the top of the columns ( 4), should be much more dark, because they get the ceilling shadow.
To solve those "problems", zoom inside the room object, do F to enter Face Select mode, and with the Trackball view and Right Mouse clicks select all the faces of the hole walls ( image above).
Do V key to add the Paint mode and in the Paint panel choose a White color, enable the Add button and set the Opacity and Size values, more or less like in the image above. Now in the 3D window move the mouse/brush cursor over the selected vertices/faces and Left Mouse click a few times to lighten the texture shades.
Repeat these operations to the ceiling and top columns faces but, this time, with the Mul button enabled, to darken the texture.
To obtain realism, details are important. Select all the columns reliefs, specially those in the light exposed sides, and with the same methods as above lighten the textures a bit.
Here's the final image/scene after some details work.
This is a basic and quite fast technique that will work with almost all kind of games.