söndag 26 april 2015

Week 2 of Big Game Project - Making progress

I've now entered week 2 of production for our project and some good progress have been made. Firstly, we finally settled on a name for the game. After a lot of indecision and a few rounds of voting we ended up with TwinShift as a name.

So what have I been doing this week? I've worked on several things including a skybox, environment and tracks. Let's start with the skybox. We needed a skybox for the game that reflected the game world so first I had to look at where the game takes place. The game takes place on a planet far off in space so I had to show that it wasn't as familiar as earth. I tweaked the colors of the skybox to give an alien feeling. You can never go wrong with a couple of planets, some stars and a sun for a skybox.


The skybox looks good in Unity and I am satisfied with how it turned out. It was fun to make a skybox as it isn't something I try my hand at that often.

It has been a very experimental week for me and I've tried many things. One thing I did this week was the terrain which was interesting. At first I tried using Unity's own terrain tool to make the environment but it wasn't really working out. It was very limited in many ways and didn't quite me quite the result I wanted.

I remembered an article I read in a magazine some time ago that described how to use satellite elevation data to generate height maps. These height maps could be used to generate terrain from and give a lifelike and realistic result as it is generated from our own earth. I then proceeded to generate  terrain from some height maps of California. I want to give credits to NASA for making elevation data of earth accessible to everyone. 



As you can see the terrain looks good, it gave good results to use elevation data. I did however move away from Unity's own terrain tool as it was not giving me the amount of control I wanted. Instead I made my own mesh in 3DS max from the height map and made a custom shader to control vertex painted textures.

The last thing I did beside editor work was the track. In the end product the game is supposed to have atleast three or four different types of tracks to provide variation but for this week I only made one. I looked a lot at other racing games to get a track that looks good even when driving at high speeds. I experimented a lot in Unity with Physical Based Rendering or PBR, which helps in achieving a more realistic look. I used the plugin Shader Forge for making the shaders. 



I like how the track turned out, but I'm going to have to tweak it when everything else it in place to make sure that everyone looks correct. That's it for me this week, thanks for reading.



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