Greetings and salutations!
For this week's screenshot (or rather screenshots), the revised versions of the murals that I believe that I showed last week:
The week just past was focussed on the first level:
Perhaps most interesting (to my mind, at least) are the changes to the murals, primarily in the shader that displays them. (As shown above, there were changes to their content, too.)
One of the actions of this shader is to distress the mural near the edges of the blocks (or bricks, cracks, etc.) of the wall behind the mural. Previously, as I recall, this was informed by the colour-map of said wall, on the presumption that darker areas corresponded to such edges.
However, this seemed a little wasteful, given that I was already making use of the wall's normal map, which seemed to carry similar information. In addition, the murals felt a little overly-"flat", and I wanted to add a bit more texture to them--but was hesitant to do so by adding yet another image to the process.
I believe that I had previously tried using the normal map instead of the colour map in distressing the walls--after all, the normals should be at their most extreme near the desired edges. However, I found that this was only partly true: while they were indeed more intense in the surrounding regions, they sometimes flattened out again at the centre of the gaps. If the cracks between blocks were canyons, at the bottom of each was sometimes a ribbon of flat ground.
In the week just past, however, I realised that I had one more source of information to draw on: As I believe that I've mentioned in the past, I store information on a given surface's "shininess" in the the alpha channels of my normal-maps--and I generally decrease this "shininess" in cracks and gaps, in order that specular highlights not undermine the effect.
Now, this gradation of shininess can be a bit smooth by itself for use in distressing. However, the normal map tends to be more textured--and so, by combining the two, I found that I could produce the desired effect.
This meant that the wall's colour map was no longer being used, and as such, I replaced it with a simple "brush-stroke" texture, intended to add a bit of variation to the surface of the mural.
The mural-shader is still not perfect--in particular, internal edges are still rather straight and sharp, the only fix that I have at the moment being adding vertices with which to vary their lines a little. However, I do think that the murals are improved, and I'm overall happy with them, I believe.
Otherwise, progress on the level was made in a number of ways: I added a little "dirt" to the colour-texture for the lower-level's wall-blocks, hopefully making them look a little less uniformly "clean", and thus feel a little more "used". I tweaked the geometry of the first of the lower tombs, and of the room above. I modelled, textured, and normal-mapped the sarcophagi of the lower level, and replaced the old stand-in models with them. I added ceilings to the some of the rooms, and a first-pass at pillars in at least one. I started in on the bookshelf in the first of the lower tombs, and on its contents.
(Some of the items modelled for these purposes may see reuse in later levels; while possibly not quite in keeping with those locations, they should do well enough, and so reduce the workload for those levels.)
It's none of it exciting stuff, perhaps, but it all contributes to moving the level forward, and thus coming closer to completing it! ^_^
That's all for this week, then--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^