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Here's the little island we'll be improving:
In
all likelihood, your game art is not as bad as this, but this does
demonstrate quite a few of the problems I've seen in beginner art.
We'll use techniques of shading, texturing, and modeling to make this
island more realistic.
Shading
is how we simulate lighting in the game engine. Shading defines light
and darkness on your models, and is one of the most important tools for
adding realism. The easiest way to shade your models is to make them
light-sensitive. Select the model you want to make light-sensitive,
press F to enter UV face-select mode, and press W to open the Specials
menu. (It's important to memorize hotkeys, especially unintuitive ones
like this one.) Select Light from the Specials menu.
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Our horrible little island is more realistic already! Real islands aren't faceted like this, though. |
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<<With the island still selected, press Set Smooth in the Edit Buttons.
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Now that it's smooth, the island looks much more real. Here's what it would look like if we set Light for all the objects:
Light sensitivity is not a good solution for inanimate objects, though, because it eats a lot of processor power.
Blender
has another light-simulating feature, though, which simulates the light
only once, then bakes it to the object's vertex colors. Simply select
the object you wish to apply the effect to, and click the VertCol bake
button in the Edit Buttons.
The
VertCol baking option is great when you're in a hurry, but the result
tends to be kind of dark. Adding more lamps can help remedy this
problem, as the values are calculated from the scene's lamps. Here's
the same scene, with vertex colors baked from two lamps:
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The last shading method is to
paint the vertex colors by hand. This is my preferred method because it
gives much more control, but it does take much more effort. If you
decide to shade your models this way, make sure that you try to
simulate the light correctly. Try to remember where the light is coming
from, and shade your models accordingly. The lightest sides will be the
ones facing the light.
Hand-Painted Gradients
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Darkened corners can improve realism
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In
general, when painting rounded models like Suzanne I use the Vertex
Paint brush, whereas with angular models such as buildings, I select
the faces individually and fill them using the Set VertCol button.
Sometimes I'll also add a slight gradient with Vertex Paint.
To
learn how to shade well, pay attention to your surroundings. Try to
learn which areas are brightest or darkest. You may want to run some
radiosity or Ambient Occlusion simulations in Blender for research.
(Don't use Radiosity output in the game engine, though--- the models it
generates are extremely complex!)
Careful use of vertex
colors can do wonders for your game environment. In the real world, one
never encounters an object without shading, so it's important to keep
this in mind when making your game environments. Shade everything, no
matter how small it is!
Note:
Since this article was written, another shading tool has arrived in
Blender, the Render Baking tool. This allows the user to use Blender's
rendering engine to create shading for textures. A complete description
of this tool is currently beyond the scope of this article, but you can
find out more about it from Snailrose's tutorial.
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