Wednesday 23 November 2016

(Nearly) Complete Game!

I spent another full day assembling the Unity scene. Everything is now in the game and working (for the most part), however there are a few hiccups with the character currently. There are a lot of tweaks which could be made to the game at this point, a lot of which are inside of Unity or to do with the level layout/functionality of the game. But I'm very happy with the work I've done as the head of environment.

Monday 21 November 2016

Level Setup

Because our head of level design isn't confident in Unity, I've taken over the job of the Unity assembly. Everything is very closed to finished and hopefully I can hand it back over to Gabe and he can set it up to match the grey blocking of the level we made previously.

Saturday 19 November 2016

My Contributions!

Here's a Unity scene with all of the assets I worked on/created for the group project. I was head of Environment Design throughout the project. :)
I textured and UV mapped everything shown here.
Modelled the character's outfit, the background, the pod and the barrel.
Gabe modelled the other assets.



The project has been very difficult with only 3 members, but I'm happy with how the end result is looking and hopefully we'll be able to setup the game on time.

Texturing Gabe's Models

I'm very pleased with how the texturing went for these assets, I spent a short while sourcing different metal textures and looking at examples to improve on what I'd done previously. The UVs also worked extremely well, a few errors popped up while I was doing the mapping, but there is little to no distortion in every asset.
While looking at metal textures I found that lighting and reflections are what makes or break a metallic texture, unfortunately the Unity toon-shader doesn't support lighting or reflections of any kind. So I really wish I'd had time to change the method we used for the toon outline.


Really happy with how everything looks together.

Backgrounds

I made a few background planes & textured them, these will be sitting right at the back of the scene to fill up any empty space. Once again, this was before I'd received feedback on the textures for the Pod.

Cleaning Up Gabe's Models

Me & Gabe came to an agreement that he'd model a bunch of assets for the environment, then in turn I'd UV map and texture them. This worked out really well in the end, because there's a definite consistency to the style of everything.

I did have quite a bit of extra work to do on the models because there was a lot of unneeded topology and every piece of the mesh was a separate entity. This meant I had to combine the objects and then merge the vertices which was very tedious. In the end this came down to a misunderstanding between Gabe and myself, since he uses a different workflow to my own.


This is a small example of the kind of topology I was able to cleanup.

Barrel Model

We needed more models to fill up our scene, so here's my contribution!
I made this before I received feedback on the Pod's texture, so it uses the same stone looking texture.
If I had more time I would revisit the textures for this & the Pod, but that's not possible this far into the project. I would also have liked to swap the toon-shader we're  currently using with the Maya method, but again, there's not enough time remaining to change this.

Tuesday 8 November 2016

Toon-Shaded Textures

Gabe exported the character rig & tested it in Unity, once the export was working properly I took a copy into my own project and tested the textures on it using the toon-shader.
I played around with the shader to adjust the thickness of the outline in different areas, and changed some of the shaders to toon-lit to make some of the darker textures stand out more. (Right picture is after the shader was adjusted on the holster and boots).

Monday 7 November 2016

Character Texturing

The group hadn't yet completely decided on a colour scheme for the character so I tried to do a mix between the final concepts Gabe & I had produced. I was really happy with the jacket shirt & skin, but the pants were looking really dull. Jacob & Gabe also mentioned the boots were far too dark and the character was missing a belly button. We had a small discussion and tried a few different tests and ended up deciding to go with dark red pants, similar to my original concept.

These are the original textures I showed the group.


Here's an updated version of the textures.



I also updated the texture on the hands, but it was more so to fix a seam that had appeared so the difference was barely noticeable. Gabe wanted to texture the hair & eyes for the character since he'll be able to reuse those textures later on.

Friday 4 November 2016

Clothing Models

I was tasked with modelling the clothing for the character and was able to use Gabe's female model as reference. I ended up making a lot of adjustments to the model's proportions and used photo reference instead, however a few elements of Gabe's original model still remain. (neck, hands and stomach). Otherwise everything shown here was modelled by me.
Once the models were finished and the topology cleaned up I began UV mapping. It's hard to show off the UVs in a screenshot, but they came out really well with very little distortion and minimal seams.