Game Environment

Shelby Way - VIST 372

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Modeling

With the number of assets we needed to create, I decided to use Maya for this project. I'm more familiar with it and would therefore lose less time with experimenting. Since others had taken on the role of handling the Unreal portion of the assignment, I wanted to make sure I carried my weight by modeling everything I could.

I enjoyed looking at the objects at thinking through how to extrude the base polygon to create the final piece. It was like a neat puzzle. I did it so much that I started to look at objects I saw in real life the same way.

After creating the shape, I then went in to clean up the topology and reduce the number of polygons. I was worried about going over the set polygon budget. However, our final result only took up around 20-30% of the set budget. Once the model was shrunk while preventing any faceting, I then exported the model as an FBX and update our asset list.

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Texturing

Texturing is quite possibly my weakest skill when it comes to the 3D pipeline. However, had a similar drive for texturing as I did with modeling. As in I wanted to texture as many assets as possible to make up for my lack of involvement with the Unreal engine. This idea did prevent a bit of a challenge because I did not have steady access to Substance Painter.

I did all of my texturing by painting in Photoshop. Because of this, I had to pay attention to what I signed up to texture since I couldn't create properly metallic or shiny objects that reacted to the light the way they should. However, I did take on the transparent coffee containers that sit on the back shelf since they are in a locked position that wouldn't be affected by the player as much.

These containers took a couple of experiments to get settled. The ones along the shelves had transparent tops with painted highlights over the glass and coffee grounds. Those were relatively simple once I had the concept down. The jars on the bar posed more of a challenge as the model did not respond to the transparent textures the way the shelved jars had. The lid also became transparent depending on where the camera was placed/angled. I ended up solving this by separating the UVs for those jars into a transparent "body" and a solid "lid."

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