This Week I’ve got absolutely nothing of interest or irrelevance to say beyond the blog itself so lets get down the fine art of breaking things.
Firstly we’ll deal with the most common type of destroyed objects, pre broken environments. They were like that when you got there, honest. Now there’s several ways to achieve a pre broken environment with Brushwork, Models, Displacements and various other smaller effects.
The oldest version of broken objects comes from brushwork; this used to be done back in the GoldSource days and is usually used by those who don’t know any better. The results often take more work than should be needed and look sub par in today’s graphics world; however there are a few times when it’s required.
With the appearance of source models became a much bigger part of broken environments, models themselves were allowed to break and shatter creating interesting and detail destruction of props, also props like broken walls existed with a perfect premade hole, so long as the texture matched what you were making. While speeding the process up dramatically the problem with the models became their appropriateness as often you would have to design the scene around the model and make it fit so you don’t have problems. This and the prefabricated look of the models is why I put all my weight behind Displacements as the way to do destroyed environments.
In order to displacements you first build the brushwork to mark the hole, and then establish the quadrilaterals you need to displace and displace. The fine adjust displacements allow will let you create and interesting broken edge to any shape and any texture you desire. Now Displacements aren’t without their problems Displacements have a nasty tendency to light annoyingly or incorrectly. Displacements smooth light and light from the vertices as I’ve mentioned before, this leaves them with an annoying tendency to pick up stray pieces of light and amplify the effect or to have smooth corners on what should be a harsh edge. To deal with the stray pieces of light a block light brush near the vertex can work wonders, to deal with smoothing problems you need to break the brush into multiple brushes and then adjust them a micron. To do that, hold down Alt to turn of grid snapping and scale the brush a tiny bit. The tiny bit will be enough to break the smoothing but not enough to visible show. If you are worried about it showing then you can always paint geometry on the vertex pulling it left and right and the other vertex will settle to a near identical position due to the way the soft edge works on paint geometry.
The last thing to help show broken objects is several minor effects. Things like decals have some concrete or plaster damage then can help out, overlays which show cracks can help when brushwork would be too much, dust and dirt in the area can add to the atmosphere of debris, and even having broken popes vent steam or drip water, broken electronics spark. The little touches to the already broken can go a long way to finishing the effect. Below is a picture of exactly how I employed displacements and a few other things to make a broken environment.
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I’d of loved to of talked about dynamic breaking and letting a player see it but that’s useless without some form of animated video showing how it happens. Who knows what I’ll have for next week.
