Wakko's Poly Disaster (Delving into Unity)

[Nyxxakai]

This is a project I started over the summer and lost traction on. Its going to be a spawn point for new player characters. I want to get my environments to a decent quality inside the Unity3D engine.

Here is a quick sketch for a layout.

I am also not the greatest of texturers so it will be interesting to get a good gold texture down.

Here is a block out from Studio Max with my sketch in as refernce.

Here are some of the rock formations and walkway tiles.

This is my third attempt at a decent rock texture. Took some of the layers I was working with from the second round and brought them with me. I was much happier with this result.

I started working on my ground textures. Went through a couple iterations of grass and dirt before I got to something I liked. Also unwrapped the walkway tiles and put a quick color base on that. Here is what it all looks like in Unity.

For the grass cards, do I lay those out in Studio max? Or is that something I do in Unity? I usually use the forest pro plug-in in studio max for our renderings. Is there something like that for Unity?

Here is a screenshot on how the scene is shaping up.

Any tips for working from Studio Max to Unity?

Also I have the w.i.p. posted here to help me keep better track of what I do and how long its been since I have done the last thing! Whats the common internet etiquette for posting for posting these on the blog then re-linking them to this or any other site?

Crits \ Comments \ Cookies welcome!

[carking1996]

Lookin awesome.

[jtok4j]

Oh Wow. (All I could think when looking at the talented pieces of artwork.)

Keep it coming. Make sure you focus on the goal and don’t get too dragged away into the new ideas that come!

Yeah, you’re on track for " decent quality inside the Unity3D engine ", I’d say.

Hmmm, the only helpful thing I can provide, is that you’re probably better off taking the grass you’ve made and painting it into the scenes (inside the Unity Engine) as you were wondering. Probably better control there, and performance-wise, it’ll be more easy to control as well (Grass performance hits/adjustment, I mean.)

Great work!

[Nyxxakai]

carking1996: Thanks!

jtok4j: Thanks for the advice. I ended up looking up “painting grass on custom meshes” and “converting custom meshes to Unity terrain”. Well the write-up is below for what I ended up doing.

Moving along with the scene. Got the rest of the stones and spawn platform unwrapped and textured. Have to finish up the walkway tiles and finally get to those fences. Also going to add some more color variation to the stones of the platform.

Been playing with how to setup grass in unity. Made a couple of “minecraft” style blocks.

The one on the right I added the grass in Studio Max. I noticed that when you bring these in Unity only renders one sided polygons. I found a shader that turned these into two sided polygons, however it seems to render the back side in black. I like that the grass cards cast a shadow, but not a fan of how the back side of the grass is so dark.

The other block I created a small Unity terrain and, using the same grass cards from Studio Max, painted in the grass with Unity’s terrain tools. I like how easy and full the grass now looks and how easy it is to add extra models. Also that I can make the grass animate slightly, but am not a fan of how there are no cast shadows and does not have much depth. I am also not sure of the poly count impact of this method as well. (not that I have any poly count issues in mind at this point.)

Maybe these are just issues with my noobness of Unity. Are either of these a good direction? Is there another direction I’m missing?

Put together the scene with the grass cards placed in Studio Max. Here is what it looks like in Unity so far.

It seems like some of the grass cards are casting shadows and some are not. I’ll have to put the scene together with blocks using the Unity terrain for grass and see how that looks.

As always Crits \ Comments \ Cookies welcome!

[Nyxxakai]

Not much progress this week. Unwrapped and started texturing the fence. Little bit more textureing on the platform.

As always Crits \ Comments \ Quesadillas welcome!

[Nyxxakai]

True to form I cant just finish one project without starting another!

Started this head sometime last week. Haven’t gotten the hang of sculpting so this is good old fashioned poly pushing.

Did a quick cylindrical unwrap of her head and textured. I find that the SSS material in Studio Max is pretty forgiving on the texture. Anyway to achieve this look in Unity3D?

Didn’t add any detail to the ear since I’ll be covering it up with hair.

Spent a good long time putting in hair guides and styling the hair. I am not a fan of the Hair and fur modifier in Max So I went the poly rout. I made a few different sized hair strips textured with an alpha. I then took those strips and used a path deform to get the hair in place. Then added more guides and strips to fill in where needed.

I had read that she voiced Supergirl in Superman: Unbound, and had thought about giving her a Supergirl outfit. After spending hours on her hair I had thought of another superhero to go with. I am a fan of the old Teen Titans animation from cartoon network and though Starfire might be a good fit here.

I think I would like to go with a re-design on her armor. I’m not the biggest fan of her other more swimsuit looking costumes.

As always Crits \ Comments \ Aardvarks welcome!

[jtok4j]

I get a chuckle, every time I visit this thread and see the word “disaster” in the subject, while I’m saying “wow” at the new content. Good work. hmm, she does look like her cheeks are fat from the middle view of her. (Not sure if this is meant to be? )

[Nyxxakai]

Jtok4j: Thanks for pointing that out. I set the front and sides up but didn’t go back to check after trying to match up the 3/4 view. I’m sure I’ll get back around to tweaking this character.

Finally got around to finishing off the fence and path tiles.

I am still having issues setting up grass. First up is the grass setup in Studio Max. The grass just looks weird and you cant tell that things are casting shadows down onto the grass.

Next up I spent a good amount of time attempting to use the Unity3D Terrain. First I tried setting up a mini Terrain for each block and found that when I copied a terrain any changes I made happened to both. So I had to start from scratch for each block, reset all the settings and re-import the detail meshes. After I got a couple setup I started duplicating those and snapping them into place. Well having all those terrains seemed to be a pretty big resource hog So I decided to go with one terrain for the whole location.

I like the volume that this shows off and how the fences and other objects shadows are visible on top of the grass. It still feels like its lacking some depth and some of the grass and flowers painted on the other side of the Terrain. So they are upside down going under the ground mesh.

Maybe there is another method to setting the grass up that I’m missing?

As always Crits \ Comments \ Aardvarks welcome!

[carking1996]

Yes terrains are a resource hog. Keep up the good work.

[Nyxxakai]

Spent some more time playing with Unity’s terrain. I also adjusted the grass card diffuse color to better match the ground texture and to stop being so saturated. I’m much happier with the result.

Crits \ Comments \ Burritos welcome!

[Nyxxakai]

Starting an Inn following the Hero Spawn Point. Started off creating exterior brick wall tiles for the first floor. Then created window and door cut outs and a corner section. Next I created wood floor tiles and tiles with edge trim to fill out the first floor.

After creating those I used assets from the spawn point to lay out a plot for the Inn. I will use the opportunity to create some bushes and trees for landscaping, and maybe a well.

And Finally the first floor exterior layout.

Next up is to create doors, windows, the first floor interior wall layout and trim.

Crits \ Comments \ Burritos welcome!

[Nyxxakai]

Worked on smoothing out lighting and textures on the spawn point. Pulled back on the blown out rocks while punching up the pedestal, walk way and fence. Also worked on learning a some c# to create an interactive camera in Unity. Check it out in the Unity web player.

Crits \ Comments welcome!

[Nyxxakai]

Created a different type of floor tile to get an older feeling wood floor.

Bit closer up on the floor.

Also got my first floor laid out. Pretty packed in with 4 guest rooms and a wash room. Sorry peeps, no showers here!

Probably get some of this textured up and figure out what all this baking normals is all about. Then move on to the second floor and get a roof on this sucker.

Crits \ Comments \ Dictations welcome!

[Nyxxakai]

I read an article a couple weeks back that a live action Teen Titans is possibly in the works. Thought I would try and refine this character some more. Started by tweaking some textures. Giving her a more orange hue to her skin and Redder hair as well as changing the eye color to green. I might push the orange a bit more in the skin.

Started unwrapping and textureing the outfit. First in Studio Max then I took it over to 3D Coat when I wasn’t getting the results I was looking for. Gotta say 3D Coat makes unwrapping pretty simple! Currently I have only unwrapped the top in 3D Coat. I will most likely take the rest of the outfit there as well.

Mostly Blocking out colors for cloth and Metals and trying out some superhero hexagonal texture. I think I’ll reduce the size of the hexagons.

Crits \ Comments \ Educational Guesses welcome!

[Nyxxakai]

Just refining the face geometry a bit. Here is the wire frame over the reference.

I did have the chin area a bit too narrow. I also tweaked the mouth and a few verts that had inadvertently welded together when I added a symmetry modifier. And a shot with the current texture.

I cleaned up the UVW’s and some of the face mapping. I still find the SSS shader in max to be incredibly forgiving on the texture.

Crits \ Comments \ Fig Newtons welcome!

[Nyxxakai]

Finished unwrapping with 3D Coat. Again, I gotta say that program has some pretty awesome unwrap tools! Ended up rearranging my UV’s and starting over on my textures. I could probably use one more round of tweaking, especially on the boot.

I ended up wrapping the hexagon texture over another UV channel then baking it so I could use it in Photoshop as a layer. I also used this method to help get rid of UV seams. Current wire frames:

Currently rendering with mental ray using a SSS material for the skin, Arch and Design for the clothing and eyes, and standard material for the hair. I pushed the orange on the skin and gave the sclera a greenish hue to match the Starfire character more.

Tried getting the character into the Unity 5.0 beta to check out the materials and lighting. Heres how she looks in the engine:

Right now I’m using the standard shader and trying to make due with that. However the spec maps come off way too powerful, I assume spec goes in the Metallic slot. I think It looked better in the emission slot. I put the bump map into the Height map slot, but that just seems to stretch the texture weirdly when turned up. I popped the regular diffuse into the occlusion slot to darken up the texture a bit.

Might move on to rigging and get a decent illustration from this character. Any pointers on rigging that much hair, and make it work in engine?

Crits \ Comments \ Grievances welcome!

[Nyxxakai]

Well its been quite a while!

The 3D visual team at work has been pushing towards getting into more interactive projects. I have been leading the charge since I have always found interactive media interesting. Back in collage I took a few courses learning Macromedia’s Director and learning the Lingo scripting language that went along. Of course it turns out that I should have taken Flash and ActionScript as that became more popular during that time. I did do a couple of project presentations, for work, where I picked up Flash and ActionScript a few years ago. And now Flash is fading away as well.

On to Unity3D and picking up c#. If my current trend holds these will also be gone within four years or so. (Fingers crossed, I hope not!) I have jumped into a few projects using Unity to try and get others at work interested in the tech and see the possibilities. One thing I was not sure I could pull off but greatly wanted, if these interactive projects get off there ground here at work, would be at least a rudimentary traffic system.

I started with a simple diamond interchange, as most of our projects deal with interchanges.

The car models are part of works library of models that I had to tweak so the tires would rotate while the cars were moving.

I started off getting a car to follow a waypoint system with much help from Christopher Cherubini’s waypoint script on the unity forums. Even with the script explained in an amazing amount of detail I could get the car to go through a series of 8 waypoints, where at the end, it would then pick a random waypoint to travel to and continue randomly picking from there.

At a lan party a couple weeks ago I sat down with a programming buddy of mine, Jim Dunne, for about 12 hours straight hashing things out. First thing we did was just get the car traveling down a waypoint chain, and when it got to the end it teleported back to the beginning of the chain. From there we moved on to populating a set number of cars per chain and controlling speed limits based on passing through waypoints. The cars soon got the option to jump from one waypoint path to another. and then collision detection came into play. By about 430 am Sunday morning we came up with this.

Traffic_Sim_v.01 (Unity Player)

Sorry for the awful camera controls! I cannot recall what every bit of code that Jim did to get to this point,but this was pretty awesome.

I spent the next couple days rigging up the rest of the cars, about 33, to go in as well as figure out how to randomly generate from the stash. Each car now has head lights and tail lights attached. (have not gotten around to getting lights to work)

Traffic_Sim_v.02 (Unity Player)

Yay! Cars have a bit more randomness to color and type now! and the camera is now click to drag to look instead of stuck to mouse look.

From here I had started thinking about traffic control and getting lights to work. I took some of the waypoints and created a timer that worked like traffic lights do. Only in this instance green lights run for about 6 seconds and yellow lights for about 2.

IntersectionTest_v.01 (Unity Player)

Well I had a hard time figuring out where to go from from having the waypoints changing colors to actually getting the traffic to stop. So I ended up doing a bunch of visual upgrades to the scene. I started adding street lights and figuring out the best way to add the road grease and so on. At some point during this I had a thought that the cars detected each other, at least if there is a car in front of itself. So I had the intersection controller tell the waypoints that when they were red, they were cars. Had to do a bit more monkeying around with Jim’s drive code, but I eventually got it to a point I’m pretty happy with.

Traffic_Sim_v.03 (Unity Player)

I will probably do a bit more with this. Add to the landscape like some trees, a gas station, shopping strip. Would like to add in a night button to see how this performs with all the car lights and street lights and what not.

Any way here is the latest clean build and a few more screen shots.

Traffic_Sim_v.04 (Unity Player)

Crits \ Comments \ High Fives welcome!

[carking1996]

Now all you gotta do is smooth the turning. Great work!

[Nyxxakai]

Thanks carking! The drive script has a variable to soften up how quickly the cars turn. I thought I would go in and add more waypoints to smooth out the turn untill I found that. No new build yet, but will add one once I get my gas station closer to finished.

Started roughing out a gas station for my traffic sim.

Still have to place lot lighting yet.

Currently I have spent the most time on the gas pump shelter. Also need light fixtures on the shelter itself.

The car wash and convenient store are still pretty rough. I’ll start roughing in some interior bits and see how far I want to take them. Still trying to get the hand of materials in Unity. Have to play with texturing all around. No new build yet. I will put out a new one when I get the gas station to a more finished state.

Crits \ Comments \ Inquiry’s welcome!

[Nyxxakai]

It’s been a while and I went back to an older project, the character from Wakfu.

Fixed the hands that were bugging me. Although they had about the right shape they were a bit too low poly. Also fix some loops in the face as well as put in full eyes as opposed to a textured in eye. And finally got around to making her side pouch.

A shot of her on the platform in the Unity engine. Ill have to see if i can get my hands on any toon shaders for Unity.

Crits \ Comments \ Jellybeans welcome!