Further Work With the Hex Tiles

Following up on the solid hex tiles in the last post, I've been doing a bit of fiddling with the generators.




All of these tiles came together pretty quickly. Procedurally generated using techniques I hashed out on GC and various other projects, these tiles are created as various randomly generated displacement maps, imported into Blender to distort a basic rounded-hex primitive, textured and baked to lower-poly geometry with diffuse, ambient occlusion and normal maps baked out as well.

Despite the crudity, the overall aesthetic is very appealing to me. And without the many in-between steps that would normally be required to try to conceal the hex grid, I can rough the tiles out very quickly.

Next up, some detailing tests. This is when I'll find out whether or not this style is going to work for me, and whether or not I'll continue to run with it.

The engine in use is Urho3D. It's a relatively new engine, but solid. Urho3D comes with out-of-the-box AngelScript support and it's own event-driven component model system; however, given that I have quite a lot of gameplay code already written using Lua and my own system, I chose to abstract away Urho3D beneath a proxy layer. Perhaps in the future, if I continue to work with this engine on further projects, I'll code to the native layers instead, or at least write a tighter and more robust Lua layer.