Speculation on creating future assets (if possible)

[Curunir]

Disclaimer: I am not a 3D artist so I'm just speculating off the top of my head.

The one thing I would love to see in Grimrock, even if no other serious modding is possible, is new wall/floor sets. I think this would be the single thing that would diversify the game and help it stay fresh in any custom adventures.

I've been ogling the blog post that explains how walls are made and I've been thinking. Here's an image from the blog post. It puzzled me that only few bricks on that wall were actually 3D. I fiddled with the graphics settings and indeed, it seems that the wall is mostly 2D indeed.

Here are some comparison shots:
Wall - highest quality - http://i.imgur.com/rhUSS.jpg
Wall - lowest quality - http://i.imgur.com/BuBTj.jpg (3D parts circled - 5 bricks and edge at foot of wall)

Floor - highest quality - http://i.imgur.com/HdpvK.jpg
Floor - lowest quality - http://i.imgur.com/9ACms.jpg (3D parts circled)

I was just wondering if the high quality wall can have such a convincing 3D look by just using a normal map, wouldn't that mean that possible future custom walls can use just flat surfaces with just a bitmap texture and a normal map, because that would mean a hell of a lot less work?

It was said that custom wallsets would be a lot of work because of the 3D nature of the current walls/floors, but I think sacrificing the few actual protruding 3D elements in favor of ease of implementation would be pretty awesome.

Once again, just thinking out lout, because I would really love to see custom walls happening.

[SpeCter]

That´s what normal maps are made for, but to get bestresults you would have to sculpt them in a 3D app(Mudbox,zBrush,3DCoat etc.) and bake the normal map out. And most of the time you need a good specular map to get a convincing look.

I guess the rocks which are modelled out are just there to make it look like it´s not flat from different angles then just looking at it from the front(it wouldn´t look right with just a flat plane while walking along the walls).

They could be using Parallax Occlusion Mapping but i tend to believe that they are not.

But yeah, you could get away with just a flat plane with a normal map applied but without much effort it won´t look that good.

[Tomm]

looks like the 3d package they are using is modo, awesome!
I'm already planning to do some custom tilesets, so let's just hope there actually will be an option to do so.

[Curunir]

looks like the 3d package they are using is modo, awesome!

Blog post with the dev image said ZBrush.

[Edit] Dumping this here, found it by google imaging for "zbrush wall": http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materi ... esold.html [/Edit]

[SpeCter]

Next to zBrush they should be using something else ,because zBrush is only for sculpting, you can´t animate with it and the bakes it spits out are far inferior to 3dsmax,Maya or xNormal.
Modo would be a pretty sweet package, if i didn´t have 3dsmax before i knew it i would probably go with modo

[Curunir]

Yeah, it's Modo, it says so right in the blog post. I can't read

[Isaac]

I would love to get a description of their step by step process for creature creation; model format, assigning the AI, and animation method.