Woah Geo is a semi procedural Unity3D art package, for sale on the unity asset store. It's a project developed entirely by myself and my good friend, Elliot Butler, in our spare time, inspired by one too many beers and the desire to expand our skills in areas of unity we hadn't previously explored.
The original idea was to create a package of flexible 3d models in this unique low poly style. We knew we wanted to create quite a large library of models in this style, but also keep things like changing the colour and level layouts possible to do in the unity3d editor, without having to edit hundreds of textures and 3D models in separate software.
While still agreeing on the fine details of the style, we quickly realised in order to not overcomplicate the end result of the project we needed to make our assets as modular as possible. Ironically, this massively over complicated the production of the project. Seeing as we both come from 3D and art backgrounds (not programming), creating a fully procedural model set became an instant, and unpredicted challenge.
We spent a large amount of time researching methods of 3D modularity, a topic I had not looked into much before but found extremely interesting.
Eventually, after a lot of experimentation, we landed on a block based system, using a power of 2 scale. This enabled us to create environment assets that could always fit together perfectly, like our own 3D lego set!
An example of the base blocks used to create environments
Using the power of our new environment block set, we were able to create interesting shaped environments (fairly) quickly.
There were however, a few problems: the environments looked too blocky (not a surprise seeing as they were made of blocks!) and we wanted to texture them in a consistent way, so when butted up next to each other the blocks would look seamless.
To solve these problems we chose to develop our own custom shaders, we had already been considering it as we didn't want a project bloated with unnecessary textures, so this was a good time to do it.
I created a shader that generated world space UVs, meaning one tiling texture could cross multiple blocks without losing the pattern.
I also created a feature that would allow the top polygons to be shaded a different colour, this allowed us to create effects such as grass topped rocks (see below), without having to actually texture this information in.
The shader proved very powerful, an when applied to almost random geometry, it could believably fit in with the rest of the environment.
We placed a few rocks shapes "off grid" to create a more organic feel to the landscapes, and hide the blockly edges of the modular base.
The next stage was to populate the environments we had created.
We created a range of props and characters which was good fun, and technically a lot less challenging! We again used custom shaders to enable in engine control, this time using vertex colours to mask different areas and change colours without the need for textures or UV maps.
We created a range of props and characters which was good fun, and technically a lot less challenging! We again used custom shaders to enable in engine control, this time using vertex colours to mask different areas and change colours without the need for textures or UV maps.
We also wanted to add some life to the scenes, and created some cool character models in a similar style (I did the humans, elliot did the animals). We were again able to use custom shaders to control colours in engine, and select smoothing groups to enhance the form.
The flexibiltiy of the models enabled us to create many different scenes with the same assets quite quickly.
Woah Geo is an on going project, we plan to add more models and updates in the near future.
If you would like a copy for youself, please find it here.
Thanks for looking!
