I’m Alex Ricketts, and I am the artist on the team for Chicken Scramble. This sprint I was focused entirely on texturing. I was assigned the modular models which were going to be used in the core loop prototype, and had to add a card for reworking textures from sprint 1. This was necessary because I exported the textures from sprint 1 into Unity HDRP instead of Unity URP, which our game is using. I asked my group about this before texturing, but I was impatient and began texturing without an answer. While this did set me back some, I was able to recover lost time since I only had to open the projects, reset export settings to URP, then export and rename.
After my group informed me we needed URP, I searched and realized my mistake: I was relying on the templates that come standard with substance painter, and needed to either create my own or make sure in my workflow to always correct the export settings. With that knowledge, I made a template for Unity URP which sped up the texturing process considerably.
Unfortunately, I still had to individually enter the old HDRP projects and export manually to URP, which wasn’t incredibly difficult, but was very time-consuming and monotonous. After I got all the old textures taken care of, I moved onto the new models, which included a wall with a hole in it, three different colored keys with emissive maps, the floor of the maze, and an exit room which would act as the finish line.
While I went about this process, I was tasked with adding something cartoony to the textures. I debated how to go about this, and first I tried using masks for things like dirt and rust to add a black outline to the walls of the maze. However, many of the masks would not work for two main reasons: First, as you can see from the image below, our walls are incredibly low poly, meaning the masks had no geometry to latch onto other than specific parts of the corners. Second, the texture I had selected for use did not want to play nice with the masks. The black outline was either barely visible, or would take over the texture.
My next idea was to use shaders in Painter or Unity, but this presented issues of its own. I found some tutorials on youtube that I was excited about, but I found out the shaders they used only worked in IRAY and Painter. I haven’t done much research into Unity shaders yet, but this is because I found a tentative solution when working with our modeler, Alex Chandler. We realized the filters that can be applied to layers in Painter had a cartoon option available. I tested the effect on the exit room, and changed different filter settings until I created what you see below on the right.
I am ecstatic that the filter performs well with low poly models and grass textures, because as we move forward with development, I believe we will create more high poly models, and I’d love to see the filter applied to them. Next in the development process, I am going to be working on our next batch of new models, including some larger combined versions of models used in previous sprints. Examples include a plus-shaped wall section, a t-shaped wall section, and a hexagonal center pin with an attaching wall. Each of these will need textures for both a hedge maze and a hay maze, both of which I am confident will work well with the cartoon filter.
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