Untitled Cosmic Horror Game -- Minerals!
Mineral, patterned off of a raw emerald (with lots of bling added for the sake of the game...) I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing with them yet, but a safe bet is usually somewhere between "sale" and "magic". It's surprisingly low poly count!
Mineral, initially patterned off of raw emerald, with shiftable parameters in its crystal shader to simulate different (possibly fictitious) substances.
The same, but in red/cyan anaglyphic 3D. (Unfortunately, some of the intensity of the color effect is lost; but it still works fine for me for finding geometric problems.)
Albedo map for the stone the emerald (or whatever) is embedded in, an important part of reducing poly count to something closer to 200.
Height map for the same. Getting one with Blender is a little tricky, if only because there are so many references a height map can work from (surprisingly); but a little shader know-how and a combined bake can still wrangle it.
Normal map for the rock the emeraldoid is embedded in. This is also a particularly important part of reducing poly count.
A few cut items which have been implemented in the game. Obviously I'm using some compositor tricks here, but it actually transferred pretty well.
An initial shot of the third hue-rotating crystal. I like to keep these things flexible; it would be great if I could code different rock cleavages, but I've got enough on my programming plate right now!
A parameter-shifting (in this case, hue and transparency) geode, more gradual than the emerald. Created with clever use of geometry shading. Already reduced poly, not as low as I would like but lower than you would think—maybe 800-ish faces.
Another raw crystal, with rotating parameters (roughness, hue, and transmission I think). I considered IOR, but honestly I'm not sure most players would even notice!
I thought I would finish off with this guy--basic quarry rocks. It may not look like much, but it's quarry rocks, so it isn't supposed to look like much... and the texture is entirely procedural. Ha. It'll probably be tweaked a bit.
Raw minerals for the untitled Cosmic Horror game. I'm going for flexibility right now. The current target is a modern (not necessarily high end, but modern) desktop machine, but it's quite possible I'll be working with other platforms in the future; so I'm starting high-LoD and working my way down. Some of these are post-decimation, some are not. For invariably complicated models, I find 300 faces to be a reasonable target to go for; further reduction tends to be geometrically destructive in a noticeable way, so I wait until I know I need it.
The geode was definitely the hardest one; I actually tried to remesh it before I was comfortable with a decimation, simply because of all of the intersecting geometry in the internal crystals. Ultimately, though, I'm not 3D-printing it, I'm building a game; and that was taking much too long. I could make better use of my time dirtying up the outer shell.