Another week has passed! This week I’ve been doing even more 3D props and textures. 
I made a set of plants to help decorate the levels. We want the world to look very lush and tropical, so these things will be scattered all over the levels. 
A billboard made by the humans. We’re thinking of having some funny faux adverts on these, like the ones in Fallout 3 or Wall-E, to give a hint of how the human lifestyle was like. As you can see, I taper the shapes to achieve a cartoony silhouette. Of course, this can add quite a bit to the polycount, but it’s essential for the look we want to create. It also poses a challenge when UV mapping – because the edges are never parallel, I can’t make perfectly square UV’s for the objects. Well I can, but then the texture will stretch. 
Here’s something that isn’t just for decoration! The yellow thing is a booster that activates when the player is near it. In-game, it’s going to have a bunch of cool particle effects going down the middle, and the yellow “gloria” is going to be spinning around. The green thing is a pick-up booster that the player can use at any time. It too will have some particle effects around it, making it clearly visible from a distance. 
We’re adding an undeground cave area to at least one of the levels, and these are the first props of a set that I’m making for that. We’re also going to have mining carts, rails and wooden supports to create some cool mines. These are the only props so far that have an emissive/glow map. They’re going to act as the lightsources in the caves. It’s going to look pretty awesome. 😀 
Lastly, I’ve made some terrain textures. I made 3 grades of grass – dark, medium and light – to provide some variation. My idea is that we use that variation to accentuate height, by using the light grass on top of hills, and the darker grass in valleys. That way we’ll get a more dynamic look. In addition, I made leaf-covered variants of each grass texture, to use in forests and under trees. I really want to start on the character texture soon, it’s going to be very fun. I might do that next week, if the stars are right and we can’t come up with anything else that’s more important right now.
ANDERS HEDSTRÖM 
Nice work Andreas 🙂 About the billboard, avoid using any texture work around the edges that’s obvious it has a UV deformation. Concentrate your texture work on the center and leave the edges rather ‘plain’, avoiding lines or checkers that might give away the texture stretch and you’ll be fine.
I really like the first set of plants, nice normal maps! Have you thought about adding an alpha channels to make the edges of the leaves less rigid?
My name is Anders haha 🙂
Thanks! Good point about the edges, I can definitely see it. I’ll keep it in mind.
I’ve definitely thought about adding alphas to the small plants as well, I just might do it now. I’m glad you like the normal map, although we’re gonna drop the normal maps from the game entirely and just have the diffuse and specular. The reason is that it doesn’t look very good on most of the objects (we just ran the textures through crazybump) and they really take the cartooniness out of the art style in my opinion
arggg, typo! Sorry, hands typing faster than I think 🙂
Right, I can’t tell what the style you’re aiming for is, but in my experience normal maps always add appeal, even in cartoony. It’s just that in cartoony they’re very intentional, almost like a pop-up effect, adding big cut-out details rather than surface texture.
Yeah, they can definitely add more appeal! But considering how many props we’re churning out, we don’t have time for much else than just running them through crazybump – which really doesn’t look that good! 😀