Warehouse: Unity level

These are some screenshots from a Unity-level I am working on. It is a warehouse in a deserted area, meant to be a connection point for distribution purposes. The feel should be lonely and sad. 

I am making this, to practice my Unity skills. It's supposed to look good, but there will be no gameplay other than walking around. Probably, I'll use it in a Unity class. (You might recognize the tree and the crate from earlier posts.)

So far, all of it is made in Unity 3 Pro. Our school doesn't have Unity 4 Pro jet. Hopefully we'll upgrade soon. I had to be creative with some special effects.

- The clouds are moving. It is just a transparent dome rotating. I made all the sky-textures myself.

- The volume light is a transparent cone with some extra planes. It took quite a while to get it right. (Or good enough.)

- The door opens and closes when you touch the handle.

- Fog is always a pain. It's very tricky to get it right.

- I wanted some more camera-effects. Too bad the frame rate wouldn't allow me. Apparently "deferred rendering" takes most of the power. (I'm working on a standard laptop.)

Up next is the environment. A few trees. Some grass. A bit more water. Well shaped cliffs and rocks. Perhaps some distant landmarks? I have some sound, but I'm not too happy with it jet. We'll see, when I'll give up...

Photoshop excercise

I needed some Photoshop excercise. So.... here's me making textures.

Race Game 4 kids

So, I needed to get some more practice in Unity. I thought I might make a race-game for my son. He likes pink. This will be his car. (He also want a big gun on the car and exploding houses.)

It is unwrapped, so that work is done. But the textures need way more attention. That will take a few more hours.

By the way, the total car is 1850 all quad polygons, including all 4 tires.

Bomb tutorial

So, this is the other game-artist-course exercise I prepared. It explains how to design and create a low poly game object. In this case, a bomb. The main lesson is "render to texture". I also cover lots of tricks using the array-tool in combination with instances of an editable poly. The students will learn what not to do in their topology, to get good normal maps.

My game-model does have seams. In this image, I've hidden them a bit. That keeps on being a pain. Advice would be welcome.

We do not cover the diffuse map. Students should already know this. The course is not about Photoshop tips & tricks.

Tree tutorial

I had to write some new "tips & tricks" in 3D Studio, for the Game-Artist-course. This is one of the two exercises we'll cover. It includes making the textures in Photoshop, lots of selection and transform tips, hair-and-fur and the daylight system with mental ray. Also, I advise on polycount and tree-silhouette.  

First facial expressions

All parts of the process are fun, but this part is especially rewarding. There were some minor problems in rigging and wiring. Getting the teeth right took a while. But overall, things went pretty smooth. I'll probably spend some time fine-tuning it all. And I need lots more morph-targets. Still, the main work is done.

Up next: Hair, eyebrows, moustache, maybe some eyelashes. More sculpting for the normal map. The diffuse channel. Creating some really good shaders. Improving the lighting and background. 

And then, finally, I must find an English speaking Indian to record some lines. Any suggestions?

Normal map problem fixed

Omg.... I hate normal maps!

So, apparently, when I render a normal map in Mudbox, it will show seams in Max. No matter what you do. I've tried all kind of render settings, different unwraps, different shaders, different lighting, .... Nothing worked. 

Finally, I tried baking the normal map in Max. Problem solved. After some serious googling, it turned out all the real pro's know about this problem. Well, now I know too. (The problem did not occure with Vincent. Weird.)

By the way, this is far from the final normal map. Lots and lots of sculpting to do. Also, I did a test with morpher, hence the smile. That works like a charm. Only a few minutes work. At some point, I will need to start thinking about the hair, eyebrows and moustache.