Citadel Island Remake in Unity [WIP]

[MevX]

Originally Posted by Bot13

Looks so great man

Thanks!

I think you would be able to produce something far greater though!

[Jasiek]

Hi!

Do you have a unity project file for linux up there in the repo? I'd like to build it myself for linux, but can't find one.

This is an awesome project btw.

I have a few suggestions. For using waifu to upscale the texture atlases, I think you'd need to first break them up, otherwise not only do they not tile correctly, but there's bleeding from neighbouring tiles.
If you need any help with that you can contact me and I can try and work on them if I have the time.

For the colour scheme, I think some of the guys who say a more bluish colour looks better are right, and not just only that it fits more with the LBA 2 look, but also the yellowish tone makes me feel like the sky and clouds have no influence over the scene, and only the light does.

[MevX]

Thank you!

I will fix the repo shortly, i just need to organize everything so it all looks more pleasant to the eye. I have no experience with Unity in Linux operating systems, but i will see to it that it works there as well.

Good call on the textures. It's something i've meant to do before but forgotten a long time ago. Also the color change makes sense, so i will be changing that too!

[Jasiek]

Whoops, I meant just a unity project file instead of "Do you have a unity project file for linux up there in the repo?".

[MevX]

I have my project up on github, if that is what you mean. But it's a bit outdated im afraid, i will update it if you wish!

[MevX]

Jasiek, I should also mention, since I just browsed on the LBA facebook group, that yes I've tried crazybump. Never really got it working the way I wanted it to, and I don't know if it's because of the actual textures themselves, or because of my own lack of knowledge.

You talked about AwesomeBump, i'll be willing to try it out. On the other hand you seem more experienced with such stuff, maybe it's a better idea to let you do it better?

[Jasiek]

I guess If you can send me all the unmodified textures (before waifu2x) that you're using I'll see what I can do.

[Neko]

I'll try this asap, holy shit those screenshots in the first posts....we need lba 3

[gravel22]

Originally Posted by MevX

disabled the fxaa antialiasing. is this what you wanted Freeman?

http://i.imgur.com/CxQr6is.png

It's better but I still prefer the first version

I think yellow lightning should belong to actual lights.

[MevX]

Originally Posted by gravel22

It's better but I still prefer the first version

I think yellow lightning should belong to actual lights.

I struggle to find anything yellow in the lightning, but it seems like several people have mentioned it, so maybe im wrong. Right now i've added a little tint of blue to the lightning, so maybe that will work better.

Hit me up on discord and maybe i can send you a build, so you can elaborate more on the problems you have

[Jasiek]

I think the idea is to have it more like this http://i.imgur.com/zwTdeiz.jpg

But if the yellowish/orange light on the walls is from a light probe, bouncing off of the brown ground I'm not sure how much you can do about it. With regards to proper light, around high noon the sun should be a little bit blue, in the morning and evening it goes orange, then there's a golden hour, and then you change it to a dark blueish colour for the moon and stars.

[MevX]

The repo is now updated and slightly more organized than before.

https://github.com/realmevx/LBA2HD

You will need the latest Unity Beta (As of writing 5.5.0B9) to edit the project.
Should work on windows, not sure about other operating systems.

[MevX]

Originally Posted by Jasiek

I think the idea is to have it more like this http://i.imgur.com/zwTdeiz.jpg

But if the yellowish/orange light on the walls is from a light probe, bouncing off of the brown ground I'm not sure how much you can do about it. With regards to proper light, around high noon the sun should be a little bit blue, in the morning and evening it goes orange, then there's a golden hour, and then you change it to a dark blueish colour for the moon and stars.

Thank you for the screenshot. It's nice to have something to compare to. Is it just me though, or does it look a tad too blue? It's very much possible that my monitor has some weird settings

[Jasiek]

Well mine may be a bit too blue,yeah... Anyway, monitors tend to either be warm or cold, frankly without a professionally calibrated monitor there's no way to tell...
I'd trust the system in unity, set the colour of the light appropriate to the time of day, and trust the light probes and light bounces in there.

[gravel22]

Originally Posted by MevX

Thank you for the screenshot. It's nice to have something to compare to. Is it just me though, or does it look a tad too blue? It's very much possible that my monitor has some weird settings

It's definitely too blue. I'm looking on my calibrated monitor for cinematography.

[MevX]

Originally Posted by gravel22

I'm looking on my calibrated monitor for cinematography.

i'll hire you as my professional quality tester

[MevX]

Changed the lightning accordingly. If you guys want anything more changed, i'll do it.

http://i.imgur.com/pPEMrBW.png

[Jasiek]

Ok, thanks for the images, so I cut up the citadel island tileset into individual images, and the first thing I notice is that waifu doesn't respect tileable images. So, what I'll have to do is to put the texture on a 3x3 grid, paste the texture nine times, upscale it
with waifu2x, and then cut out the middle one... I think.

I'm thinking about building waifu for linux and doing it offline, but that'd be such a pain...



EDIT:

OK! It works!

Procedure is, use this site http://waifu2x.me/, choose photo and for a 64x64 image choose 8 as the scaling factor.
Once it's done, load the file into gimp, run selective gaussian blur with a radius of 16 and maximum delta of 29.
Then put on a grid, cut out the middle square and voila, you got a smooth, tileable texture! (attached)

EDIT2:
will probably need some noise added.

EDIT3:
Wavelet denoise seems better then a selective gaussian blur, preserves more detail.

[Jasiek]

The one problem I'm seeing with these textures in the atlas is that I can sort of figure out which some of them should tile with, but not with all, so some are bound to still be not perfectly seamless . Still, almost done upscaling the Citadel atlas.

EDIT:

AAAnd you're right, the toon setting looks way better in most of these.

[MevX]

Originally Posted by Jasiek

The one problem I'm seeing with these textures in the atlas is that I can sort of figure out which some of them should tile with, but not with all, so some are bound to still be not perfectly seamless . Still, almost done upscaling the Citadel atlas.

The whole thing about the textures being all together kinda bothers me. It feels clunky and dare i say it, outdated. A way around this would be to do some uv mapping, some crazy shit like that.

Anyway looking forward to the atlas being done

[Jasiek]

Well, with the UV mapping...

one way, would be to replace the textures with different colours, bake that out as colour maps for colour splatting, bake the terrain to a properly aligned heightmap, and use the colour maps, the heightmaps, the textures with the Unity terrain system to tile textures.

[Jasiek]

Here it is, a gimp file with layers and a png file:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...G8?usp=sharing

[MevX]

Thank you! You did a great job with the textures, far better than i could imagine. I will get a screenshot out with it in action today!

Now normally i would add a brown background to the whole of the atlas, so that the ground also has some kind of coloring. I wonder if there is a cleaner way to avoid this. Far as i know the color of the ground in LBA 2 was achieved through palettes right? If this is the case, i wonder how i would go about achieving the same thing in Unity.

[MevX]

Right now im too tired to actually go into detail about the result, so i'll try to keep it short.

Old: http://i.imgur.com/pOQi4LV.png
New: http://i.imgur.com/mmVc0NZ.png

As expected, it all tiles more nicely, and prevents bleeding of other textures. The blur adds a nice smooth look to most textures, although personally i think the grass doesn't really need it. At least the edges of it.

The old textures are double the size in comparison to the new ones, 8k vs 4k. So the new version doesn't look as clear or sharp. Just something worth noting.
Other than that i think it's a clear improvement. Thanks again Jasiek.

I'm really excited to see what the specularity/normal maps can achieve!

[Jasiek]

Ok there's clearly some space for improvement here still. Need to make the kerbs tile better, and the grass doesn't tile. I'll see about that. The grass alpha needs to be painted so it's not so smooth I think.

Your old ones where 8k? Whoa boy Somehow I thought they weren't...

EDIT:

Since it's impossible to make the main grass tiles tile not only left,right,up,down but also when rotated around...it's impossible to make the side pieces always fit the main grass, so the side ones will tile with each other, with corners, and some sides of the main grass piece - we'll still have seams there, albeit less