Games Production - Spring Submission (M4/5)

In the fourth milestone, we had to present a content complete stage version of the game. 

Above is a step by step of the process of UV unwrapping one of our tree branches in our game properly. In the time it takes to unwrap one tree, let alone the nine versions in our game, I would be massively behind the milestones and deadlines. To work against the tight schedule carried out by only one environment artist in our team, I relied alot on Automatic unwrapping objects.

Here is one of the final colour palette textures I made and placed on to the Oak tree models UV's. While using Automatic unwrapping to an advantage, there were slight issues in warped and distorted faces. As there is a stylized approach to our game, I only had to tweak the layout of the UV's for around half of the time; as opposed to laying them out from scratch and taking longer than was necessary.  

Once I had completed all the UV shells, along with the textures on all nine trees, I made a little diorama base to render out in mental ray.

 Previously, I noticed that all the trees blended too easily in the lighting. As the colour theme was autumn tones, I made three sets of palettes for each nine types of trees.

I was very happy with the outcome of these diorama renders and hope to do more in the future.

With all the trees complete, I moved on to placing them in the game space. As trees are dominant in the natural environment, this was an area I knew I would have to put a fair amount of time into (our game being set around the edge of a forest). After finding out I could not export scene obj files from Unity into Maya, I had to manually position all of the four hundred or so trees in Maya. I was only able to successfully match some of the trees thanks to being able to display two windows at once as seen above.

Thanks to help from a fellow student, I found out that I could convert Nurbs to Polygons via the Modify settings in the overhead tab. To save wasted faces underneath the ground, I masked out a lake shape to match the topography of the landscape.

Here is the final map and tree positions in Maya, textured via Lambert - file, using the hierarchy structure method (rather than manually adding all four hundred materials or so)!

I followed this same process in Unity using Materials with the textures assigned to them. After highlighting all the trees I wanted the matching texture to go on, I simply dropped the material onto the inspector to the right. To achieve the autumn colours and to make the trees feel unique, I slotted in irregularly, individual textures from the three different palettes onto the trees in the scene view.

In a recent update of the free Standard assets package on the Unity Store, they enabled camera effects and visual adjustments. This was something I was very interested in as I have done colour correction and other effects previously in college, so being able to add them to our games medium for the first time was alot of fun. 

Here is a screen shot in game with textures and a few of the effects in place. I added a subtle vignette and tilt shift effect aiding the autumn colour correction. I also was playing around with the idea that the mini map could be displayed in black and white for easy viewing and to stand out against all the greenery.

As the game map development came along, I created more and more objects. To help, I made sure to keep my hierarchy organised and all the items named. Here I have all the posts in our game placed out to be exported.