Part 1, Lessons learned.
Around three years ago I was just getting my feet wet in the world of 3D modeling; we were working our buts off building the new 3D engine that became Galactic Civilization II, and I hoping to get in on making the ships. However as the newest artist on the team, I was mostly playing catch-up, I spent the bulk of my time on the UI, and stole a little time here and there to learn basic box modeling and texturing.
The team was only 6 of us, 2 Coders, 2 Artist, and 1 jack of all trades, and Brad, the AI coders / game designer. Before we even hit beta our primary modeler left the office, he continued to work on game elements remotely, but it made it much harder for me to fallow his techniques, and more importantly for him to continue to be involved in the Games evolution, The result was that when GalCiv2 Shipped the existing ships were not really optimized to what our game engine had grown into. In the last 5 moths or so of GalCiv2’s production I was mostly done with the UI, and I found myself finally getting to do some modeling. Since I had worked closely with the developers in working out the details of our rendering and custom coloring system worked, I was able to exploit the engine a bit better. I took the opportunity to go through some of the basic ships and give them a going over.
As a primarily vector artist I decided to do my ship textures in CorelDRAW. Everyone pretty much thought I was crazy, but some how I convinced them it would work. Though 3 years later I see my early examples and I have to wonder why they did not try harder to stop me. Once we had our custom coloring, normal maps, and light maps worked out, I spent some time doing test. One of the first things I finished was the Human Survey ship, at the time I was quite happy with it.
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Human Survey Ship as shipped on the CD, 3 512x512 Textures, Color, Normal, and Light maps.
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Sadly Just about the time Dreadlords shipped, I was just getting the hang of truly exploiting the in game engine. Luckily I got to try some of these techniques in the 1.1 update, and by the time we got to Dark Avatar, I was able to go through and re-texture and touch up the Starbase. This however just made me more anxious to re-texture all the hulls.
When we were deciding weather to do Twilight of the Arnor, I was very happy to finally get my chance to let Galactic Civilization II show its true colors.
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Human Survey Ship for Twilight of the Arnor. All Human hulls and structures now use one set of 3, 1024x1024 Textures, Color, Normal, and Light maps |
Over the last 6 months I was able to go through and completely re-texture 3 of the 5 hull styles, starting with the worst offenders, and then pushing on through to some of the ships that a year ago I was proud of. Amazingly enough this process cut texture memory down to 1/4th. Over the next week or so I am going go into the details of how this was all done.
In Part II, I will explain texture sharing, and how it made such drastic changes possible, while actually saving memory. |