Alt modelling is a 3D modelling technique that can be used to create an environment or object fairly quickly and because it’s so quick to construct, it makes making prototypes fairly easy and fast to do, so I decided to make an environment using the alt modelling technique - but this would be more of a practice environment rather than an environment related to my game in this post, I will make a separate post of applying this technique to a prototype of certain aspect that could be included in my game.
So to start things off, I start off with a plane with slightly raised platforms on both the left and right side and an indent that resembles a path, then I added a cube mesh to the plane and moved the cube to the left side of the mesh and was constantly readjusting the height and length of the cube and continued to add more mesh cubes and adjusting the size, height and length until the edge of the left side was filled with cube meshes.
I also included a smaller and skinnier cube mesh which I placed slightly next to the other meshes which was to act like a reference of the size and the distance cubes should be in alignment to the reference, which I went and corrected the distance so that the meshes weren't too close to the reference.
Then I selected the top of the cube in the middle (with the white highlighted square) and in the edit mode, I selected the insert faces tool (the tool highlighted in blue on the left side of the screen) so that I could shrink the pre-existing face and make a new face for the cube which I then selected the extrude region tool (the new tool that was selected which is highlighted in blue) so that I could raise the height of that face to make the entirety of the cube even taller.
Then with that cube mesh selected (which is indicated with the mesh is highlighted by a highlighted orange edge around it) I navigated to the add modifier section (located on the right side of the screen) and I selected the displace modifier and included that modifier to the mesh, I also added the subdivision surface modifier but I needed to alter some things in the menu before applying the modifier to the mesh, I selected the simple option (located directly underneath the copy button) and then on the subdivision section, I levelled the render, viewpor and quality to 3 which would help me later when I needed to include the next modifier which is the displace modifier.
I scrolled down to the distorted noise section of the modifier and on the distortion basis and the distortion drop down boxes, I selected cell noise for both of the boxes and adjusted the size of this by 0.47 and then applied the modifier.
The last modifier that I included into the mesh was the remesh modifier and in that modifier I adjusted the mode in the dropdown box from sharp to blocks which gives the appearance of distorted buildings, then I changed the number next to the octre to about 3.
Then I added the following modifiers to the meshes until I was happy with the desired look of them with again constant readjusting of sizing of them but then I noticed something whilst I was applying the modifiers to the other meshes, I could change the appearance of the first cube mesh I modified by clicking on the up and down arrows located on my modifiers in the add modifiers section which did simplify the appearance of the building but it also kept the slightly distorted appearance.
After learning about this, I applied it to the other meshes until I was completely happy with the appearances of these buildings. Then once I was happy I copied + pasted the meshes one by one and moved them to the otherside of the plane, rotated them and adjusted the size of them so now it can look like a block of buildings but they look completely different to each other.
Finally it was time to texture these buildings, first was to add a colour ramp (the light blue box) and connected it to the base colour in the principled BSDF box (the green box), then I included a noise texture (the orange box) and with the colour ramp box I dragged from the Fac section of it and joint it with the other Fac point on the noise texture box so that I could apply it with the mesh that I selected.
Then I added a mapping box (the purple box) and connected the vector point from the noise texture box to the other vector point in the mapping box., next I added a texture coordinate box (the red box) and connected the object point of this box to the vector point of the mapping box which after doing that did create a stone type looking texture to the mesh.
Next I moved the mapping box slightly to the left to make space for the next box to include in between the mapping and the noise texture box and that was a separate XYZ box (the slightly smaller light blue box than the bigger colouramp box), which when I connected it to those two other boxes via the vector point to the mapping box and the X to the vector point of the noise texture, it created lines that formed going downwards on this mesh which made it look stripy, but I wanted these lines forming around the mesh instead so I connected the Z symbol (of the separate XYZ box) to the noise texture box.
Then I went back to the colour ramp box and on the drop down box next to the RGB drop down box I changed the option from linear to constant so that I was able to have the colours going down from black to white (with the black line being on top of the meshes) and decided to add an emission box (the small dark green box) and connected the colour point to the colour ramp's colour point and the emission point itself to the material output's (the small red box) surface point as this would allow the buildings to have a glow to them.
I repeated these steps until all of these buildings had the same texture but I did alter the colours along the way via the colour ramp settings and had to make sure that I had to create a separate texture with each individual mesh, otherwise which I did personally experience whilst texturing these buildings, was that once I decided to texture one of the other buildings, it would make all of those meshes to share the exact same texture.
Then after making all of the meshes look identical to the first mesh, I decided that I want to change the appearance of at least two of the meshes to set the apart from the glowing buildings, so the way I did this was that I included a brick texture and connected this to the noise texture box from the colour to the vector point, which then made the building appear to have a glitchy barcode appearance as if some of these buildings haven't been fully loaded yet. Then I was constantly adjusting the colour of this particular mesh until I was happy with the look of it and applied this specific texture to some of the other buildings. One final step was just for me to adjust the lighting and camera angle of this scene before being rendered with constant readjusting of camera angles.
This is the final result of my practice build using the alt modelling technique overall, it was really fun and easy to create these buildings using the alt modelling technique and how I would use this technique to create an environment for my game I would this to create mountains or cliffs that would be apart of the environment and a possibly set up for a puzzle mechanic my game would have.
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