Beginning 5-6: New Town (Patreon)

Now that the Poker card game has been finished, I've started to make the  new town. This new town will serve as a way for you to acquire food  ingredients and do other activities in an alternative way. For version  v0.75, the town will be empty but it will be populated by other resident  lolis in v0.8. First, some color improvements:

For  a long time I always thought the rocks were too dark, so I did some  color correction to make the canyon rocks look more realistic. Above you  can see it cut from bright to dark. The bright is the new color  corrections.  Anyways, the town was given the following layout:

The  town will be located behind the main house hill so the game can  properly cull away the village. This will be useful for VR performance  and keeping the poly count low. The town was then made by having 10  different buildings placed in a random fashion for variety.  

The  town rests on a hill and was inspired by a real life town in Mexico called "San Miguel de Allende". I wanted this town to look realistic so I  wanted lots of detail to be visible but also have a manageable workflow  that I can handle myself. 

To  start, I decided to reuse window and balcony models on all houses.  There are different variations of these models in terms of width and  height but they all share the same architecture style: 

 Each  house was placed into its own prefab so if I edit one house, it updates  the rest of the houses. Then I jumped into Substance Painter and made a  generic painted plaster material:

 It  didn't look good enough and it made the houses look very flat. So I  added a bumpy surface to really pop out the walls with unevenness:

That  worked but I wasn't satisfied with the detail yet. I wanted a sort of  ancient traditional feel to it so I thought of a way to add wear to the  walls. Natural wear like plaster falling off or rain weathering away  surfaces typically happens more often on the curvature of objects (the  sharp edges, exposed curves). This is because the points at sharp edges  or curves have a higher probability of contact with the outside world  because they have more volume around it. So what I did was paint the  curvature of my house models with red vertex colors to signify where the natural wear should be visible:

From here I took a random concrete noise mask and modulated it with the red vertex color to produce a wear mask:

Then I just popped this mask into my new wear shader and voila, natural organic looking wear:

The  next step is to start adding in different colors to each building to  make a colorful town.

I'm not done yet but I should have more defined  results in the next devpost.

Stay tuned!