by 0x55651e399ca32d7e2f44034fb62996937af0bc49 (Ozymandias)
The web-based Builder offers a wide variety of assets ready-to-use for anyone’s scene.
However, the texture of all of these assets is abysmally flat.
As a consequence, the majority of the scenes out on display in Decentraland look rather archaic !
And a lot of potential new users just close the application on the spot.
Should the DAO commission efforts to upgrade all of these Builder assets ?
* Step 1
Creating customized textures for each of the Builder assets (using baking if possible).
* Step 2
(maybe part of another Proposal)
Adding textures to make use of the Bump-Mapping functionality.
Should actual textures be implemented for the DCL Base Assets ?
Rationale
You never get a second chance at making a good first impression.
The majority of the scenes in DCL are created using the Builder provided by the Foundation.
This Builder is filled with assets that are essentially texture-less.
And so the majority of the scenes are filled with assets that seem to be of the age of the dinosaurs.
As a first impression for new users, this is far from being ideal !
Despite not having any “texture” to speak of, the memory space is consumed anyway, as can be seen in this screenshot.
In order to get the colors for the various parts of the model, the UVs are placed on the corresponding location in the “color-palette” contained in the texture.
95% of the texture remains essentially unused.
The proposed solution
All of these color-palette textures can be repurposed with ones which make the assets look more “modern”.
The UVs would also have to be adjusted accordingly.
“Top-notch” results are not truly needed, solutions using AI might actually yield acceptable results.
Impact
As these assets are currently deployed in a majority of the scenes, the “modernization” of the look of DCL would be immediate and widespread.
Possible backlash
Some content-creators may actually like having this “old-school” look for their scenes. Their fears can easily be assuaged.
The old assets can remain available for use, with a name-change reflecting their deprecation.
They would have to be replaced manually to “undo” the modernization of the look, but the number of cases where this would need to be done shouldn’t be expected to be high.
It is even the case currently that most assets only use a single color, yet have a complete color-palette assigned as 512x512 texture, from which they get that color; this could be done without any texture at all.
I like the idea, but current quality of assets looks good too. It’s possible to rework them and improve with baking, but it’s not very important for now. For example hairs look very low poly and it’s important to improve them, while builder assets looks good without improvements for now.
I like current style of builder assets. But yeah, baked textures will improve them a bit and if all source files will be available, then it will be easy to do some color variation for builders, etc.
Also I think that job should be done by teams like DAPPCRAFT / Polygonal Mind, to keep same style of assets and make sure that all of them is done properly.
Not by individuals that don’t know how to bake assets properly, how to follow texel density, how to use trims, udims, etc.
For now there are lack of individuals that know all of this rules and able to do stuff in same style. (Only few people like me, Doki, Malloy, etc)
So I would trust more to team here that know all 3d modeling rules/nuances and follow this rules to deliver best quality as possible without any trash normal maps, etc. A lot of assets should be reworked and experienced 3d team with team leader will do that much faster than one individual.
Also I don’t see problem in one texture with palette, if all assets were saved as gltf with one texture folder. Then all of them will work and use exact same material / texture, without any duplicates. (By the way, Decentraland support GLTF instances and works with gltf + texture folder), so it’s not problem at all if everything saved and used correctly in builder scene. (But looks like it’s not correctly used now?)
Edit: disclaimer: my first post drastically changed after this conversation.
90% of the people I know who have visited DCL have disagreed with you.
I should have titled this Poll Create DCL Base Asset Textures.
The main point is that there is currently no texture to “rework and improve” in the fist place…
Let’s not mix things up. This is a Poll to ascertain if it should be done in the first place.
If it passes, then the viability of the teams which bid Proposals for solutions can be determined then.
Indeed, if this 512x512 texture were properly unified, then things would make a lot more sense (yet still look very archaic).
However, it is unclear how easy it might be to get something like this, with model files often times being stored in their own specific sub-folders.
In the ButtonsTable.glb, more than one color is used; but in a general case, when only one color is needed, simply having that in the Base Color means eliciting the need for a texure altogether:
Yes, this may be solution. But FYI Blender material colors won’t look exactly the same as texture with color palette. You can check that by yourself, results will be absolutely different due to shading settings in Unity. Green color on texture =/ green color on material. They will look absolutely different in-world.
Is this not absolutely unexpected behavior ? When I open such different models in other viewers, they end up looking exactly the same.
Has a bug report been logged against this ?
It depends on viewport/shading settings of different engines. Material color in blender will not look exactly the same in Unreal Engine / Unity / Babylon viewer because settings are different. Even in blender material color looks different if color management settings is different than Standard.
For example default Filmic color management that Blender use (looks like 4.2 don’t use it by default) will make colours look more gray/smoked. This setting is good for rendering, but completely destroys texture/color look identical as in image viewer/game engine.
I understand why Foundation used color palette texture instead. Textures works better, and default colors OK for something inside Blender, not in engine. I think Unity material color will look different compared to Blender too, I think I encountered with that already when I was doing some testing for Spatial…
