I am helplessly slow in making graphics.
These have been frustrating two weeks with very little time to spend and even less results. I’ve been mainly updating the arena graphics: improved UV usage and resolution in all surfaces, fixed the missing faces in the background grid and re-modelled stands so the crowd can feel more comfortable. I quickly generated 30000 statically batched capsules for dummy spectators without a noticeable FPS penalty, so that's good news at least. In the process, I also continued to write the next chapter of “Making graphics for ATP” (see the first post for the links). Hopefully I have time to finish it within the following weeks.
As usual, things didn’t go without problems. Very soon I started noticing some weird glimmering artifacts around the new arena boards. Although I knew the glitches appeared because of geometry problems in the model, it took forever to finally find them. Some vertices were too far apart to be properly merged, and they caused duplicate faces. Merging with a greater distance helped.
A little.
Immediately after that, occasional white pixels started flickering at the bottom of the boards. The problem was in the emission texture: emissive pixels bled into neighbor polygons on large mipmap levels (smaller textures). I'm not sure if there's a way to completely solve a situation like this. I ended up just creating a separate object for board emissions.
After several days of fighting, I’m happy that the arena starts to take shape. Lots of polishing is yet to be done, but the main issues should be solved. Here are some images of the new arena. Once the models are finished, I'll have to improve the lighting. Dimmer appearance looks better already.
