Giving buildings some more detail

[polarstar]

I was messing around in blender to see what it would look like if I just gave some building walls more depth by doing some basic extrude and in my opinion it makes it looks so much better.

[King of Worms]

I was thinking just about this I like the idea a lot, it looks really good

[pango]

There was also this attempt, but I don't know if it has made any progress since April...

[Silence]

This extrusion experiment looks really nice!

[DigitalMonk]

I would love the extra actual depth. My only concern would be (as mentioned in the other attempt's thread) that if the texture gets swapped for a different region, the real depth won't match to the painted/fake depth...

I know Unity can do bump mapping, but that doesn't help if you find yourself slinking along a wall up close...

Could this be done with Geometry Shaders? I don't know if a Geometry Shader can take a texture as an input as well as the base polygon. If it could, then the shader could do those extrusions at render time in the GPU, so they'd always match in whatever region or climate (once geometry shader textures were made, of course, so there's still a lot of manual labor setting things up)

I'm at work, so I get blocked from a lot of useful sites, but a search for "unity geometry shader extrude faces" had some promising looking results.

[King of Worms]

Sorry this makes no sense to me. I dont see a reason for that concern. Can you be more specific?

I thought that the models can be made material specific. So there are no shared models across the regions

If thats not the case, we are effed eitherway

[BadLuckBurt]

I would love the extra actual depth. My only concern would be (as mentioned in the other attempt's thread) that if the texture gets swapped for a different region, the real depth won't match to the painted/fake depth...

I know Unity can do bump mapping, but that doesn't help if you find yourself slinking along a wall up close...

Could this be done with Geometry Shaders? I don't know if a Geometry Shader can take a texture as an input as well as the base polygon. If it could, then the shader could do those extrusions at render time in the GPU, so they'd always match in whatever region or climate (once geometry shader textures were made, of course, so there's still a lot of manual labor setting things up)

I'm at work, so I get blocked from a lot of useful sites, but a search for "unity geometry shader extrude faces" had some promising looking results.

I'll have to test this once I have the data for all locations but I don't think your assumption is correct and you may have misunderstood AlexanderSig's comment in the other thread, he was talking about the seasonal textures, hence why he mentioned TemperateSummer as an example.

The same models are reused throughout the regions but with different model IDs. It's the same mesh with a different texture set assigned, the unique object resulting from that has it's own model ID and that's what Polarstar would be replacing. The only thing that 'could' change is the seasonal texturing for a building but that should pose little no problem. If I read the modding documentation correctly, it should be possible to make models act the same as the vanilla models when it comes to changing texture sets during season changes.