From this point on you generate all your masks and smart materials in DDO until you get your final texture. I highly recommend not using standard smart material and call it a day. You have to make sure to get rid of the generic look of procedural textures. Quixel is pattern based so you can scale them and that is pretty much it. But now we can use the paint tool to also add variation, which is great. The power of generating presets and smart materials was the reason why I chose Quixel suite to be part of my pipeline. After creating the input nodes like normal map and ambient occlusion I was able to automate textures based on my smart materials that worked already perfectly in my scene.

My library of presets and smart materials grew over the course of creating the scene and I was able to use it on other levels as well, to get the production speed up.

Unity 5 Needs Plugins

The problem that I had during creating the pipeline was that I didn’t have access to certain tools that I got used to while working with CryENGINE. Unity 5 doesn’t have a solution for decals for instance, which is really not understandable for me. I was hoping to use POM and certain other next gen dx11 features on decals which I couldn’t. We didn’t change the standard shaders however and stuck to them. I was mainly focusing on getting the big picture and not the craziest shader setups. Rick Future is a point n’ click adventure game, so you have certain camera shots that track and pan slightly along the movement of the protagonist. You can’t come up close to a wall like a FPS game. It will probably happen that the game gets changed to a more advanced shader system in the future but that is not the case for now. I used certain plugins like SE Natural Bloom & Dirt Lens from Sonic Ether, Light Shafts and Easy Decals though.

Light and reflections

We are using deferred rendering in our project with the specular PBR workflow. Therefore we can use many lights without killing the performance of the game. The way I start my light setup is usually out of a dark scene. I mean, what is better than adding controlled information to get a certain look instead of starting from a default lid scene? A scene usually uses 3 lights. Key light as a main source of light, rim light to highlight silhouettes and a fill light to boost some of the too dark shadow areas. At this point I set all my non­dynamic assets to be static to let the system know which assets getting bounce during light generation. That is also the way to get access to glow. And we did need glow for certain science­fiction elements of the game. I used dynamic lights mainly for the key lights to get shadows and light variations in the game. At any time the lights can be baked though (make sure to generate a second uv with non overlapping uv shells for lightmapping).

You can use objects that are almost invisible to cast glow as some sort of fake light source. The tunnel area behind the main engine for example got the bounce light from a transparent object.

This effect could also be achieved by baking the bounce and then hiding the object after bake.