spacedogvam

Early Access Asset + Demos Release: City Backdrop

Added 2024-10-19 00:01:33 +0000 UTC

Ever since I started in VAM one thing I've always wanted was a nice city to put my scenes in. My first attempt came in the form of my Skyboxes aesst, and while this was a big success with some beautiful cities it was copyrighted to Google so I couldn't use it myself commercially. Disappointed I set about finding another solution.

My criteria were:

Commercial use allowed
Highly efficient with little or no fps hit
Looks good enough to be a background for other assets like rooms, apartments or houses
Versatile enough to be used in a variety of scenes with different times of day and weather
Large enough that it can be used as a single background leaving no gaps in the scenery

This was no easy task but after several failed attempts I finally found a city asset that I could work with and I set about fitting it to my needs.

I created a full set of normal, emissive and metallic maps for the city to maximise the detail I could bring out if it without hitting performance, upscaled images, fixed a host of problems with it along the way, as well as creating a variety of reflection probes to handle close and distant scenery in a variety of conditions. It took a long time and a lot of hard work but I'm finally happy enough that it can serve as a worthy background and bring some extra life to scenes.

I have created a separate demos var with some cool things like a bus and elevator ride, as well as weather conditions to show of some of the things you can do with this asset. It really does open up some possibilities. You could for example dress it up to be a cyberpunk city or make some interesting scenes involving scale.

In the Hub release page I have put a section on how to get the most out of this asset, with some tricks you can do some really quite cool stuff and make life much easier working with such a large asset. You can also use the Demos Hub release page to find the demo dependencies.