I decided to try putting the terrain I created into Unity to test how difficult scene dressing would be. Here is a screenshot of the terrain with some assets added to it:

Overall, I’m happy with how it looks so far, however for the actual scene I will create a new Unity project and redo this. One key issue I had was that when I placed the assets, they didn’t place directly onto the terrain, since the terrain doesn’t work the same way it would if I had created a terrain within Unity. This isn’t too much of an inconvenience for small scenes, but for a large environment it does mean that more time has to be spent on placing objects into the correct positions.

I also had trouble with making the assets the correct sizes, however, before I begin working on the scene dressing for the final version of the project, I can work on correcting the sizes to make it easier to place and scale objects correctly.

I will also have to work on making certain assets stand out more from the environment, as I mentioned in one of my posts yesterday. One way to do this would be to adjust the colours of the leaves on the trees, which seems like the best method currently. The screenshot below gives a good idea of how this could look:

Another issue I have is that I need to figure out how I can include water in my environment, as this terrain features a river. I also mentioned in one of my very early posts that I would like to include water within my in-game environment. If all else fails, I could resort to using one of Unity’s standard assets, however I would rather avoid this and try to create my own assets wherever possible, especially considering that the water in the standard assets pack most likely would fit in very well with the rest of the scenery due to the art style I’ve used.

One technique I could use for creating the water would be to use the technique that I used to create the “trippy” patterns that I would like to use to make the collectables stand out. I could create a normal map that has patterns of triangles so that it fits with the appearance of the rest of the environment, however I will have to wait until I am back in college in order to test this idea out, as it will require the use of Photoshop and a drawing tablet.

I know from previous projects that I can set an object to render as either transparent, fade, or cutout (although I would have to test which one would work best), and then use the normal maps to create something that looks like water, with a combination of transparency and the appearance of waves and depth in the texture.

For the water, I would also have to figure out whether to allow the player to go under the surface or not, since I don’t currently know how to code swimming, and I also don’t know how to make the underwater environment look right. One way around this may simply be to place a lot of rocks under the water so that the player never goes deep enough that their head goes below the surface when they do travel through the water, although placing that many rocks and getting it to look good would be time consuming. I will most likely ask my teachers and fellow students what method they feel would work best.

Overall, I feel that I now have a much better idea of what my game level demo is going to look like and how I will need to prioritise my time over the next few weeks, since when I created my time planner at the start of the project, I wasn’t sure how long certain tasks would take, especially considering I hadn’t yet planned out the rest of my project, which would have allowed me to get a better estimate based on how much work each task would require. For example, at the start of my project, I didn’t know what art style I would be using and therefore didn’t know how much time I would need to create my assets. I also didn’t know how much time I would need to set aside for coding since I hadn’t figured out what mechanics to use in my game and therefore didn’t know how much coding would be required.

Today I decided to have another attempt at creating a terrain in Maya. This was partly so that I could see how well it would work and how long it would take, however I decided that if it worked well enough, I would be able to potentially use the terrain I worked on today as the terrain for my actual project. I will include screenshots below to show my process and what the terrain looked like at different stages as I created it.

The first step was the create a plane with a large number of polys (I decided on using one with 10,000) since using one with fewer polys didn’t look as good as I hoped when I tested out an example yesterday. I then used the triangulate, reduce, and smooth tools to give a more random appearance to the way the polys were distributed, as I feel that fits better with the aesthetic of my assets. I also feel that doing this gives the environment a more “natural” appearance. In the screenshot below you can see the appearance of the terrain without any colours added:

To create the actual features within the terrain, such as the mountain and river, I selected vertices and used soft select so that when I adjusted their heights, other vertices around them would also be adjusted. I then worked on making the flatter parts of the landscape have slightly varied heights so that they didn’t look too flat and so that the polys of the landscape would be visible. I also selected the “harden edges” option in the mesh display options since this makes the polys more visible (I have also done this with all of the other assets I’ve created so far for my project).

Once I finished adjusting the landscape, I started adding colour. The first colour I added was a bright green, since most of the landscape is going to be grass and making everything green to begin with saved me a lot of time on filling in the grassy areas with colour. After I did that, I moved onto selecting different areas to change the colour of, starting with the mountain. For each colour, I selected the faces that I wanted to change the colour of and then created a material to apply to them. In the screenshots below, you can see the landscape at various stages in the colouring process:As you can see, I decided to include areas such as a large patch of darker grass, which I would like to make into a forest, and an area of sand which I envision as the edge of a desert. If I had more time to create my project, I would like to create a larger map with more biomes, however I feel that the scene dressing for that would take longer than the time I have been given.

I would also like to note that I didn’t create an initial map to base this terrain off of. This is, for the most part, because I like the idea of simply seeing what happens as I adjust the terrain. Working this way gives me more freedom to experiment and find out what works and looks good, and what doesn’t. This is also why I left a lot of my planning regarding what assets I would like to create so vague, since I wanted to have more freedom to experiment with what assets would work and what I could create quickly. Doing this also means that I put less pressure on myself to create certain assets, since I don’t have a strict plan to work to and therefore am unlikely to feel as stressed about not being able to make everything that I originally wanted to, and as a result, I am able to focus more and work better.

I’d also like to include a screenshot of all the materials that I have used on this terrain, just to show the colours I’ve used:

As you can see, many of the colours are only very subtly different. I felt that this looked better than using shades and tones with too high of a contrast when colouring an area made up of one material (grass, rocks, sand, etc).

The two screenshots above show a colour scheme idea I’ve been testing. The first image shows the trees I’ve made with plain colours instead of textures, which I feel looks quite effective, however it doesn’t stand out as well as I’d hoped because of the terrain also being brightly coloured.

The second image shows some of the trees with the collectables texture that I’d made for the cherry blossom. I actually quite like the way this looks, as it stands out much better from the rest of the environment.

I now need to figure out how to get the trees with green leaves to stand out from the grass terrain. I can experiment with different shades of green, and potentially having some texturing work, however I’ll have to wait until Tuesday before I can begin texturing, as this requires the use of a drawing tablet which I can only access while in college.

I would also like to note that after putting the example terrain into Unity I realised that I would have to make a few adjustments when it comes to making the terrain that I will actually use in my project. These adjustments will include:

• Modelling a much larger terrain to begin with.
• Having smaller polys to improve both the look of the terrain and to make it easier for me to place assets, since placing assets on my example terrain wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped.
• Adding more contrast to the colours used on the terrain both to make the polys more visible, and the improve the overall appearance of the environment.

I also realised that unlike when I create a terrain in Unity, when I place an asset onto the terrain, it doesn’t automatically place directly on top of it, meaning that far more adjustment is needed to get the asset to where I want it to be. This isn’t too big of an inconvenience, however it does make scene dressing more time consuming.

Today I worked on making more assets for my game. These included various rocks, animals, plants, and fungi. I also decided to experiment a little bit in Unity to see if certain ideas would work. Here are some screenshots of the assets I’ve made so far:

(These are all the animals I’ve made so far. They include a pigeon, a mouse, and a lizard.)

(These are all of the fungi I’ve made so far. Some of them are designed to be put on the trees, since that’s where they’re found in real life.)

(These are all of the plants I’ve made so far, including the cherry blossom tree, a fern, and a flower.)

(These are the rocks I’ve made so far.)

Here are some close ups of some of the assets that I made today:

I’ve also Included some screenshots below of some ideas I decided to test out for how to make the collectables stand out from the rest of the assets:

To achieve this effect, I used some normal maps made from textures that were created for one of my previous projects, as shown below:

For this project, I will most likely work on creating more normal maps to get the effect that I want and to make the effect stand out more.

I actually figured out how to create this effect while working on a project in my spare time. Here you can see some gifs from that project showing a more extreme version of the effect:

If possible, I would like to aim for an effect fairly close to the one shown in these gifs, as not only will this be easier for the player to see among other objects in the scene, but I also feel that it looks better and will make the game more visually interesting.

As for the other assets, I’ve actually feel that plain colours work very well with the low-poly art style, so I’m likely going to use very simple textures and potentially plain colours for a lot of the assets. This will also save me time on having to create textures, meaning that I’ll have more time for scene dressing and coding, which is important since coding is not something I’m particularly skilled at or experienced with at the moment.

I may produce slightly more detailed textures for assets such as animals, however I’ll have to determine whether this would work or if it would look out of place. I will also have to determine what kind of textures to use for the environment since I feel that just having plain colours would look odd. One way around this could be to create the terrain in Maya and colour the individual polys so that I’m still using plain colours, however there would still be variations in colour. I’ve quickly created an example to show what I mean:

Some problems with this idea include that it would be difficult to test whether certain areas of the terrain are too difficult to get to while I’m actually in the process of creating the terrain, since while Maya does have a feature that allows you to walk around the scene, it doesn’t work the same way a player character would do.

On the other hand, I was able to create this example very quickly, with the most time-consuming aspect being colouring the polys, and since I can colour multiple polys at a time, this doesn’t actually take too long either. It may take longer to create a full environment, however I would be importing the terrain into Unity for the actual scene dressing, so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem either.

 

Since I’m going to be using a colour scheme with brighter colours, I decided I wanted to test out a couple of ideas while modelling some assets. One of these ideas is to include trees that have blossom (such as cherry blossom trees) since these often have bright colours while still fitting into the environment. Below I have included a screenshot and a render view of a cherry blossom tree that I could include in my project:

I will most likely start to experiment more with colours and textures once I’ve created the majority of the assets that I need to model, however this example does a good job of showing how simple textures and materials that can be created within the modelling software (Maya) can be very effective and work well with the low-poly art style I’m using.

Here are some more trees that I’ve created for my scene.

Here are some mushrooms I’ve made:

 

 

After modelling my first few assets, I decided to attempt to rig and animate the pigeon to see how difficult it would be, and to try and learn the necessary skills to animate other assets in the future. Below, you can see the pigeon and its rig:

I also attempted to paint weights onto the skin, however this didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, since whenever I switched between the joints, new weights appeared, as can be seen in the following screenshots:

(The correct weights)

(The incorrect weights)

This also meant that actually attempting to animate the pigeon moving without any issues was impossible. Here are some examples:

The rig itself was fairly simple to produce, although I required the assistance of another student (Connor Pugh) to teach me how to create the rig initially.

Here’s another example of an asset that I’ve made to test out the art style I want to use:

Here are some examples I’ve made today to give an idea of what art style I might use:

I’m quite happy with how they turned out, and I think I may include the pigeon in my final product. I’ll probably experiment more with the mushroom and try making some other objects with a similar low-poly art style to see what they’d look like.