Towards our final hand-in and alongside wrapping up texturing the models for our game, I looked at particle effects and the best visual optimisation possible.
Here I have made a camp fire for the start of our game in the forest. I made my own customized image of a flame that could be inverted as a translucent file in a material shader.
I played around with various settings in the inspector to get the real-time movement of the flames right; as well as the scale. While making all of the textures and models I was not thinking about the end result and how it may make the game run slower. Above is one of the processes that helped with the particle effects. By using the stats feature I could check things like the games FPS which adjusted to a reasonable fifty eight (after reducing the amount of max particles from one thousand down to two hundred).
In Unity's Standard Assets package, is a water prefab I used for our lake and river (suggested by a fellow student). This allowed me change various settings (in no time at all) to get a moving plane texture to transition with another on loop; producing the illusion of running water. I enjoyed playing around with this and would love to experiment with this in the future.
One practise I followed was organising my folders into an easy to read order (scenes, models, textures, materials and scripts). As a group we decided on a day and night cycle for our game. This entailed a lot of fiddling with a rotation script to get the right timing (as well as the time included to get around the Vertical Slice). Here I added in a directional light acting as the moon in the hierarchy, on to that of the standard directional light sun. While being on an opposite direction on the axis, when the sun goes down the moon comes up.
Above is the cart wagon UV unwrapped in Maya. The player encounters this crashed on its side in the game. I enjoyed trying to work out features that were more important and recognisable to keep when it came to building at a low stylized topology.
Here I have the wagon in-game in Unity with the textures applied that I made in Photoshop, exported as a TGA file and placed on as material shader.
As our game is an RPG with turn based combat, I had to model a set of dice. After the modelling stage I knew I would have to spend a fair amount of texturing and to help with the medieval theme, I put together some font ideas for the numbers on the dice.
Eventually I went for the second to last font in the previous image (Sanvito Pro) and positioned all of the numbers for the D6, D8, D12 and D20 dice.
I dropped the four dice in to the test scene I built in Unity to play around with the lighting emission for the die (each dice illuminates softly as a light source for the player to navigate at night).
I was really pleased with the results above of a barrel I modelled, unwrapped and textured. I was able to do all of this in under forty minutes. After practise on all of the other assets, I knew the stages required to create the barrel quickly and efficiently.
In our game is a small village with several houses in. Here I have unwrapped a Tavern as accurately as I can (with the building stages behind the highlighted).
As I placed the houses into the game, I realised that it did not feel alive. To help make an atmosphere, I made a watermill building so I could animate a wheel rotation in simple code (as seen above). After a few errors within Maya with axis orientation, I was able to get the wheel to spin on the centre point and I was really satisfied with the results overall.
In addition to the atmospheric elements, I made a torch light particle effect and a smoking chimney emission. Although I looked at a few tutorials for smoke, I was able to tweak the lifetime to last long enough to fade at the right height elevation. However, there were a few problems with positioning and I also made sure to debug the environment (become aware of the collision mesh/ nav mesh issues etc).
These are the two images I made to generate the texture for the particle systems. The Photoshop 'cut-out' effect was a popular feature throughout each texture I made and helped promote the three layered 'stylised' approach we were aiming for.
As I had to work from my own designs (issues revolving around the Concept Artist) a lot of the time for the environment, I worked from reference images of my own or from my own knowledge. However, there were a few designs, towards the end of the project, that I could use such as the weapon sheet above (Concept Artist's work) I used as a template for the characters swords and enemy mace.
The castle ruins, situated at the end of our vertical slice, took longer than expected and I had to manually position several dozen vertices that did not want to flow well with the UV map.
Here is an early build of our game with the nav mesh re-baked. Assigning all of the models materials and sizing within the exported unity package took many many hours but the results paid off. While we were importing all of our groups work into a single organised build, I made sure to organise structures in the same order that I built my models; following a list that I had made on paper.
Something I regret not checking was the object sizes to the 4K resolution textures I used through out the map. For example, something like the ruins needed a 4K texture (4096 x 4096 pixels), whereas the small torch posts did not need that sort of size file. If I was able to go back I would have definitely improved this area of my work for an efficient running and less memory taken up build.
Above and in the previous image are screen shots of our game with occlusion culling (suggested to me by a group member). This fantastic feature, that I thought would be very time consuming, enables and disables rendering objects to help with frame rate and increases a games performance; which we needed after combining several dozen scripts and UI etc. Unity's manual overview was very clearly laid out and it took me no time to customise the tool and bake for our game.
I took quite a large collection of photographs to use for texturing in and around Farnham (a town with quite a few post-medieval buildings and environments). For many of the images such as the wood, I used a few effects in Photoshop to make the 'cut-out' stylized effect seen on the right side of the image overhead.
One of our limitations of the unit was a a total polygon triangle count of 300,000. To accurately measure that I was on track with this, I added into a scene afterwards all of the OBJ & FBX files (55). In total, our low poly stylized environment only came to 57,371 (without the duplicated objects).
I have had a lot of challenges in the environment building and have learned that going back over something can sometimes be more efficient such as in the topology flow. I attempted to construct the world to the best of my ability in our stylized theme; while following the concept art as closely as possible. Above is a before and after side by side of the first build with very simple elements, to the second to last, with almost all the assets in place. Overall, I enjoyed working in a different style to my normal work and strived to make the game look and feel good all in all.
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