Group Work
This week the team handed the beta of the game for playtesting. This week really helped me realise that my environment needed to be imported into the game this week in order for it to be implemented into the final build without issue. I did have some models left to make, but they were mostly small items needed for set dressing so didn’t take long.
The group is currently on build 3.0, and now that my environment is finished and handed to the group’s programmer; I plan to spend the remainder of my time with the game playtesting the builds and offering help to the other 3d artists should they need help.
Individual work
As said, this week was spent bringing my assets together in a convincing environment and giving them in usable files to the group. I started by making the roof for the room, whi
ch I painted a off white to give some contrast to the copious amounts of dark wood in the scene.
Once I had the roof in place I thought it looked a little strange to have such a large interrupted white space in the renders, so I created a roof support using Zbrush, the same way I created the chair and footstool. This gave me what I hope to be a nice roof design which fits the scene well.
Then I made the vertical frame needed for one of the 2d images created by another team member. (You cant see the 2d image as Arnold render doesn’t recognise image planes in renders). I didn’t know how to add images ad objects in a 3d game within unity so I couldn’t place these in my scene for my team, however they already had the two pictures, and I explained which frames are used for which image.
I thought the floor looked a little strange, as it was mostly empty. To get around this I made a simple rug. I think the rug looks quite nice and helps break up the wood a little bit, however one thing that bugged me was I couldn’t bake the object down to a low poly. Just like last term, when baking cylinders down to sharp edged shapes they leave artefacting around the edge. While this is fine for background objects, the rug in this scene is quite prominent so needed to be smooth. I had to use a high poly object, however as the rest of the scene is entirely low poly I doubt this will effect the performance of the game.
With these assets made the scene is done in terms of modelling and texturing. I quite like the scene I made and feel more capable as a 3D artist than I did at the beginning of the term. I think the thing I enjoyed most about this experience was learning to use Zbrush in conjunction with maya, as this has opened up a wealth of possibilities with my models in the future. While it did take a week off my schedule It didn’t result in me being unable to deliver for the group and I could still hand my assets over in a timely fashion.
One issue I faced with giving the files to my team was how to apply the textures given to my by substance painter to the fbx in unity. I discussed how to do this with another team member who showed me how to go about this. An issue specific to my models was that I had created them in a modular fashion. So, for example, I only modelled one side piece, one wheel and one step for the ladder and then duplicated and moved them ass needed for the renders.
This would have posed an issue for the programmer as the unity code file was not shared to the group and he would have no idea how the final model was meant to look. Thankfully I found that if I re-exported the fbx of the fully finished models in maya the UV of those models didn’t change, meaning I could still use the textures I had made in substance painter. This meant that I could simply export the entire scene from maya and apply textures to each model within unity. So the programmer got one file with the room finished and scaled.
I intend to devote the remainder of my time with this project to playtesting and offering assistance to the other modellers should they need it.