10.4.19 -Creating Normal Maps and Importing into Unity

Yesterday I worked on figuring out how I could create water for my project. I did this by adding normal maps to a plane to see what kind of effects I could achieve. I found that this worked quite well to create interesting looking water that I feel works well with the art style I have chosen for my project.

Once I determined what technique to use to create the water, I realised I needed to create some normal maps to use specifically for the water in order to achieve the look I wanted. This is one of the things I worked on today.

I originally intended to create a texture in Photoshop that could be used as a normal map, however I realised this would require a lot of work in figuring out how to manually draw the normal map to have the heights that I wanted. This lead me to use a different technique, which required me to create models in Maya that had the heights that I wanted the normal map to have. I then used x-normal to render out a couple of normal maps from the models I made. These normal maps can be seen below:

The first image shows the normal map that I ended up using for the water, while the second image shows the normal map that I actually ended up using for the collectable items in my project. In the screenshots below, you can see how these normal maps look when applied to objects within the project:

In general, I’m quite happy with the way these assets look with the normal maps applied to them. In particular, I feel that the collectable assets stand out well from the rest of the environment and have an interesting appearance.

Once I finished creating the normal maps and testing them on my models, I decided to import all of my assets into Unity and begin scene dressing. So far I feel that it is going quite well and that the assets look good within the environment. Here are some examples:

So far, I have only worked on putting trees into the scene, however once I feel that there are enough trees and that they are arranged in a way that I feel looks good, I will begin adding in some of the other assets. I may also begin asking people for feedback on how they feel that my project looks so far. For this, I could ask some of the people who answered the surveys that I created during the pre-productions stages of the project, as many of the respondents to the art style survey were students that I am familiar with.

In this post I also want to include some screenshots to show all of the assets I have within my project so far (excluding the terrain):

These screenshots show all of the models and materials in my project currently (once again excluding the terrain itself), including the normal maps I created today, and the materials I created using them. I’m hoping that by the end of the week I will be able to finish scene dressing so that I can move on to the coding aspect of the project, as I feel that this will be the most challenging part for me and I would therefore like as much time as possible to be able to work on it.