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Noise Hunters Devlog 13 - Creating Detail without Textures

Noise Hunters
A downloadable game

Hello [Code_Name: MEVYE] [Location: CLASSIFIED], welcome back!

Today we will see how we make details in objects without the use of textures.

Unity has a material system (we will talk about the non-HDRP materials in this post) that allows to join different types of textures, such as: albedo, normals, roughness, etc. Creating this way very detailed surfaces without the need of modelling. As how a real human eye works, light bounces form a surface and reaches the human eye and then the brain interprets the information that is given, therefore if the light is non-existent, the eye can't "see" any detail. This is the a problem we faced with Noise Hunters, a game in complete darkness.

As we discussed in the Shader's devlog, the shader that we use only affects the camera and doesn't really create any source of light, so what you see in the game is the 3D detail in the models in contrast with the dark background. Knowing this, we have an easy solution to our mentioned problem, model all the detail! However, we have to be careful as we are not 3D modellers.

With the help of external assets we where able to fill a lot of room with detailed models, but one of the area that had nothing was... the floor! Yes, you might think: I didn't think about the floor until you mentioned it! Well, as more conventional games, would use textures to give detail to floor more easily, without the need of using complex 3D models with too much polygons, but as we've described above, we can't use textures in Noise Hunters and asset packs online have floor texture and no 3D models for the floor. On the bright side, modelling a floor is quite easy and doesn't require much to create enough detail to fill the void in the floor.

As we developed Noise Hunters we started to see a relation between: Game Development and Magic. As long as the spectator doesn't see the trick behind everything, his mind is seeing magic. This can be applied for both fields, as sometimes, there is not enough resources to make something perfect, you need to make some "tricks" to fool the mind of the player. 

Thanks for reading and don’t make any noise! 🤫

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Contact:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Noise_Hunters

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/noisehunters/?hl=es

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL2X-i8jfzZOubewJfed6hQ

Mail: noisehuntersgame@gmail.com

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