After a long period of testing many popular game engines, I settled on Unity, and have been busy pushing its limits. Integrating Unity into an already complex pipeline has been an edifying challenge. I do appreciate OTEE masking the applications complexity with a straight forward interface and approach which satisfies my usability, scalability and compatibility requirements. I’m positive future versions will provide more rudimentary drag and drop solutions freeing up time for more imaginative game concepts.
Here are some in-game environment images. My objective was ‘photo real’ and Unity 1.6.2 made it possible. These simple images are composed of basic polygon geometry with surface baked textures, a custom made skybox, particle system and Zero lights! (No bump or normal maps were used in Unity. I found that layering them with a complex texture made my UV’s pop, and masking UV seams is a time consuming pain).
Well enough rambling for now. I appreciate the Unity community for it’s willingness to share ideas and discuss difficult topics.
Hmmmmm … I thought once a scene is imported into Unity you NEED to create Unity lights to see your meshes …? I haven’t tried without. Maybe this is an answer to some problems I’m having with the “look” of my scenes …?
You need to set the rendering setting for ambient to 100% white to use the ‘light’ from the texture as it is in the texture. The default ambient is a darker grey that lets ‘real’ lights light up the textures in game.
As for the renderings they look great - the only thing that bugs me is that there is a manhole vent where the steam is coming from - yet isn’t the tub filled with hot water? If so the steam would not be coming from the manhole but from the entire surface of the water.
Software I use for modeling and Surface Baking the Textures is Lightwave 3d. The most time consuming part of this learning project was getting the settings in Lightwave fine tuned so my UV seams wouldn’t show up in Unity. My textures are 2048 each, which is not judicious for real game design, and getting away with no lights required turning the Edit/Render Settings/Ambient Light to white, that’s a good and bad thing - areas where you need that dark atmosphere are challenging to control.
I’ve include my FBX files which have the geometry and textures embedded so you can build the project. The textures are far from optimized, and having a lot of wasted space isn’t good UV design, so if you are learning don’t do what I did for your final game output. Put as much stuff in your UV space as will allow. I needed to keep thing simple for better diagnostic clarity, so keeping objects and textures separate helped.
Zip file contains - FBX, assorted other textures used and screen capture of my unity particle settings.
Making Steam:
The Screen capture images for the particle system show how I made the steam. Make a new Alpha/vertexLit material and attach the Dynamite_Smoke image, and make sure you generate it with Alpha on. Set the Color to white and the opacity to 2 (Note: you can do a material as an Alpha/Diffuse as well, but the vertexLit makes it a little brighter)
Thanks for posting the files, it looks very nice indeed.
Re: seams above the door. As it looks like you’ve already used a “UVBorder” on the surface camera and setting the image to clamp had no effect, I suspect that it is your geometry that is responsible for the seams that appear at extreme angles, rather than your textures / material settings.
I noticed that the points at the top the door have no corresponding points on the walls either side (i.e. the poly above the door is suspended rather than part of the wall). Also, where the inner/outer walls intersect your wall ends are poking through the surface.
One way the seams above the suspect door can be removed is by adding another point to the walls on either side and welded them (creating tris to meet the door corners). I’ve also removed the wall intersection seam by cutting the outer wall edge short before it intersects with the inner plane.
It’s a bit hard to explain in text so I’ve attached an example.
