MEGAGON Labs

Since meshes have a limit number of vertices and only parts of the terrain will be visible at once, we added a “chunk-system” to the automatic lowpoly mesh generation. Based on the size of the terrain, the final mesh is split into a certain number of meshes, each with a low enough vertex count.

To keep a more or less evenly spaced grid across all levels an automatic terrain setup was added. This way when creating a new level, we can ensure the resolution and size always fits to the rest of the game.

For details on the terrain generation have a look at part 1 and part 2 of our low poly terrain posts.

Follow-up on part 1…

After some tests with modelling the terrain in external tools and importing them to Unity, we realized that this workflow will make it extremely difficult to quickly iterate the level design. So we were looking for an editor in Unity itself. There are some nice poly-modelling tools out there, but we haven’t found anything convincing for low poly terrains - so we started our own tool - based on Unitys default terrain tools.

Since the Unity terrain editor works fine, we just needed to create a “low poly” copy of that. By sampling the height of the terrain in a regular grid, we could now create a mesh that approximates the terrain, while still having hard edges and therefore the desired triangle-look. The mesh generation is pretty fast, so we are able update the low poly terrain in real-time while editing the underlying terrain. Hiding the original terrain we can now directly edit the final result (see image).

One thing we notices was that due to the sampling process the editing sometimes became a little bit difficult, since only a part of the terrain information went into to final result. Using a low grid resolution for the original terrain and matching that resolution for the low poly mesh was the solution for us. To make the terrain look a little bit less regular, a slight random offset is added to the horizontal position. The height values can be quantized to create a more terrace like look, emphasising the poly look.

Random horizontal offset

 

Quantization of vertical position

Continued in part 3…

The setting of our downhill game is a rough mountain landscape, with all kinds of cliffs, paths, hills and so on. All this has to fit the stylized low poly look we are aiming for.

Normally when creating terrains in Unity you would use the build-in terrain system, which lets you sculpt & paint the ground of your scene easily. You can quickly jump from editing to playtesting back and forth until you you are happy with the result in terms of look and gameplay - all without leaving the editor, importing files or converting any data. Unfortunately you will never get a real low poly look, even when reducing the grid resolution to a minimum. This is because the surface normals are interpolated across the triangles and since we have one normal per vertex, it is impossible create hard edges in that mesh.

In the image above both terrains have the same “resolution”, however the one on the left has additional surface normals (one normal on each vertex per ajacent “quad”) and therefore no “smoothing”, which is what we are looking for.

Continued in part 2!

Several people told us they don’t like the blood when crashing, others however like it. So we will probably give you the possibility to switch it on and off.

Here two examples with and without blood:

Hey everybody,

Megagon Industries is a three-person indie studio located in Berlin and Munich founded in 2013. We decided to start this tumblr blog Megagon Labs to share impressions from our development progress of upcoming games and prototypes as well as some behind-the-scenes looks.

Critique & comments are always welcome. If you have any questions, feel free to ask! Also have a look at our facebook site and our twitter accounts.