Well, I picked up my old copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World today. Brings back some fond memories, I must say! Lots of time wasted.
It got me thinking- how on earth is it textured? Here’s an example:
Now UV mapping here doesn’t look feasible. THe textures would have to stretch to far. Here, bits of dirt, paving and grass blend together as if they were one texture, but I’m not sure how that would be possible, especially on the old N64 versions. I just wanna know- how do they do it?
Another thing is the Wild World world rotaty-thing. As in, it looks as if you are on a planet, because the things in the background scroll out of view as you run around. I thought at first that it was the player that caused it to rotate, but then again, how do the NPC’s walk around it in the same way?
As for the rest of the game, simple stuff. I’d just love to have an insight on how you guys would do it; I’m looking at a similar Unity Project that I could make.
Never played the game, but by the looks of it I would have though using a tile set, maybe one using alpha for multi-texture blending. Would need to see more to be sure.
Hmm… still not sure how that would work.
I’ve read up on the scrolling effect as well, but I’m not sure how it would work with characters- from what i’ve seen you can use vertex displacement to achieve similar effects, but when you’ve got other characters, it’s a bit :S.
The “scrolling” effect is probably some sort of vertex displacement. Some form of transform matrix that pushes things around a spherical centre.
As for the texturing, I’d imagine it’s either just a lot of custom made blend tiles or, more likely, a set of tiles with transparent parts on their border tiles and layered up inside the shader (or done in actual polygon layers).
The funny thing is it’s because of UV mapping they were able to pull this off. With clever tile design and UV layout they were able to create curved paths, patches of ground, etc. All without the use of layered textures, alpha blending, masking or other more modern techniques. There are some alpha textures still used in Animal Crossing but not as many as you would think and most of them are reserved for shadows and foliage.
Here is a scene pulled from the game with everything removed except the terrain and the tiles that were used to make it.
And before people go off about copyright, yes I own the game and no you can’t have the assets or the scene pictured above. I will however post other screenshots with the wireframes if people are interested as looking at how other games were made is oft times the best way to learn how to make your own.
Haha that’s very true. First time I saw the screenshot it looked perfect. After he pointed out how it’s done I can now see seams.
Amazing what you can get away with.
