Allegra did a writeup on her side of our 2D-3D Conversion involving these Cliffs!

Hi everyone, Allegra here! I'm the 2D artist on Morningstar and I thought it could be fun to show everyone the methods to our 3D Madness TM.

The transition to a 3D world has been a necessary one and there were initially a lot of questions for how we would handle more intricate items like cliffs. Buildings with flat walls were one thing, but we wanted landscapes to really interact with the world around them. 

At first we considered creating meshes from scratch and texturing faces individually. It gave us an undesirable effect in comparison to the mountain (pun intended) of artwork already made, so the team came together and brainstormed until we found something that worked. 

We floated the idea of applying art to a cube with a projection method and in finding that could indeed be accomplished with the setup of an iso camera, decided to take it a step further and create meshes for each individual piece. Since this was something new to us and existing documentation was slim, we wanted to share the process start to finish! Starting off predictably, step 0 is reference gathering. 

(A mood Board of references of what it looks like when Marble Cliffs are eroded in real life.)

We liked the idea of having something more organic in shape with all sorts of cozy coves and hideaways. Now all we need is the Morgana equivalent of gulls! 

Step 1 entails the concept stage, where I go through a few iterations until we have some shapes that will work well together. These are all gone over to ensure they'll fit onto our designated base as well as keeping the coding process smooth.

After that, we sweep over into step 2, which is where I load all those happy little drafts into a Photoshop document. Each cliff and asset in this game is hand painted with love and attention to detail, we really want this world fun to explore and visually evoking. This area hasn't changed much from our initial 2D approach, save for making sure boundaries are where they're supposed to be.

 In the next step, you can see some of the final pieces displayed together. I initially paint these on a 4096 canvas and then they're exported as 1024 for crisp detail retention. The HD art files also make it easier to go back and make resolution updates in the future if we need them. 

Step 4 is where it gets interesting! Brandon and James made us a wonderful template cube in Blender to load the art into. It's applied with a node in the "shading" tab of Blender. 

Step 5 is where I go in a do a low poly model of each piece. We try to keep them 500-900 and then apply smooth shading to all the faces. Some variations of cliffs are more difficult than others, Sandstone being the easiest so far and Slate taking both Brandon and I a hot minute to figure out. 

We have deduced that for more wild landscapes, we'll create a sketch, then make a mesh. That will be loaded into Photoshop where I'll paint it over to save us some headaches when modelling. Step 6 is mixed though out 4 and 5 as well. We use an extra cube to simulate water levels and make sure the mesh is shaped how I estimated in the original art. Plus, it looks really cool! I get a lot of satisfaction seeing the final forms come together. A great way to check work, too.

After that is all done, they're exported (2d texture and OBJ) and sent over to Brandon. 

He cleans them up really nice and ensures everything works smoothly in our Unity project. He also adds in all the rubble and detail along the base which gives the pieces an extra level of life. Its definitely been a transition to switch over from our solely 2D system but the functional benefits are well worth the work. Plus we get to keep the original art! We're all dreaming of misty mountaintops now.

Brandan here -- 

We've come a long way this month getting our art converted, and this week are getting the last of the old 2D Cliffs, the Slate, converted over. 

Everything else was a breeze.

We're gradually merging the Editor and new Animation System over to the newly merged Project with our editor, and beginning work on Proc-Gen environments again.

Soon we'll be running through cool forested biomes and mining our cliffs. :)

A very long time coming, and now lit with realtime lighting, with dynamic lights like campfires and torches, as well as day/night cycle. 

Instanced Meshes mean we can have hundreds of thousands of these meshes on screen at once and not bog down even old hardware from before 2015. 

Water can also interact with these meshes in a way that is seamless, and will looks great. We're going to buy an asset with a reasonable license so we don't need to spend months working on that.

With the new Animation Editor, and the new 3Dified World System Editor, we are THIS CLOSE to working on a game that looks like it's in Alpha, instead of Pre-Alpha. The progress over the last few weeks on the back end has been incredible, and one of these days I'll get James and Curtis to write us up a blog post about the fantastic work they've been doing.