The Village Blog #14

After getting my textures reviewed I decided to take everyone's suggestion and add a bit more detail to my houses. This is so the house will have some depth to it and not look too flat. The changes that I have made were to the wall and the roof. 

It was a bit tricky adding some details to the second house but I eventually figured it out and manually painted the lines on my house. After touching up on the textures I now started to work on my scene to put my models in. 

This is the final scene I have made for my houses. Any other model that you did not see me make belongs to Gigel who is a 3D artist from Poland. With his/her RPG package it definitely helped make my houses stand out in the beautiful environment!

Back shot of the houses

I made sure to rotate some terrain objects so it doesn't look too uniformed and a bit more natural. 

I also recolored some textures from Gigel to make a flower garden and a road on the front. 

My goals for this semester was to create a entire village with a game mechanic where you would have to go around and start collecting objects. I wanted to make a beautiful village that is inspired by a town in Reine, Norway. 

As you could see here I planned to model out all these models. Now looking back I realized that this was a ton of work to do all in one semester with my skill set. It is crazy to believe that I thought I was able to model, texture, and UV 5 whole houses and a market!

This is the layout that I have originally thought of for my little village. Instead of believing that I could model all of this in one day I should have thought of something a bit more smaller. Then, once I have accomplished all the tasks that I needed to do I could then add more tasks depending on the amount of time I had. 

Modeling all of these houses was the easy part but even though it was a simple task it took a ton of time getting the measurements right and giving them clean UVs. I also had to go back and clean up my models based on the reviews that my fellow peers gave me to improve them. 

Modeling all of these houses was definitely a learning experience and it is thanks to my classmates and my professor. I could now say looking back on my models that I feel proud of how clean they look. 

Same goes for my UVs. At first I thought I was doing it the right way by making cuts and unfolding them. However now that I am told what needs to change, making those improvements gave me confidence as a modeler. 

As you can see in the picture above there is a clear difference in which UVs look the most clean. 

I also got to learn more about the latest version of Unity that has a significant amount of improvements compared to the last version such as lighting. 

As you can see here the lighting is beautiful in the new version of Unity since they have introduced a new feature which is the Universal Render Pipeline. Although this concludes the work I have done for my semester of college I plan to keep working on my village and eventually finish up the third house that I had to put aside for now. This has been a wonderful learning experience and I plan to utilize all that I have learned from my fellow peers and professor to create a beautiful environment for my level. 

The Village Blog #13

For this week I decided to put aside the third house for now and focus more on texturing my objects. That was the plan until I realized I still needed to fix the UVs for the small objects that I plan to put into my scene. The lamp post was a bit tedious since I had to UV the frames of the lamps into tiny parts. 

When it comes to UVing the fence it was a simple and clean process to accomplish since it is mostly made up of rectangles and did not have any complex geometry. 

I made sure to clean up the UVs for my door as well. Once again the only tedious process was UVing the frames of the windows but other than that everything went on smoothly. 

When putting all the objects into one UV set I made sure to save constantly since ti kept crashing when moving around the UV shells. Overall, I like how it turned out and it definitely utilizes the space in the UV set compared to my previous old one. 

I then begun to ID the areas that I want my specific textures to be placed. This makes the process more easier since I do not have to worry about free painting the textures on the models. There was times where I would have to go back and forth to re-adjust the ID maps if I spot something off in Substance Painter. Thankfully this was a simple process to do since all I had to do was simply change the color. 

ID Map For Small House

ID Map for Big House

There was times like this where I had to free paint in the black mask to polish up the edges. This is just one of the examples of what I had to go through to achieve my desired textures but in the end the results proved to be worth it.

This is the idea of how I want my textures to look like. I want it not too detailed and just pure and simple. Most of the textures are just basic colors with no height maps and added little details like dirt or wood fiber. 

I believe this picture shows what style of textures I am mostly aiming for. I wanted the houses to look simple and clean when I put it in a low poly environment. 

I had a bit of trouble deciding to go with what style for this house. In the end I decided to make the top part of the house red with white window frames while the bottom half would be white with red window frames. 

Here are the houses I took reference from when texturing my first house. What I love about this house is how the red outlines stands out making it easier to spot the openings and entry ways. 

This is the house that I used to reference my second house. I liked the style of how the top half of the house is in contrast with the bottom half of it. i did not like the light red colored roof that it provided so I just went with a blue roof just like the first house. 

Since I only have a short amount of time to finish up my work I plan on just working on the changes that my fellow peers recommend to me and if I finish early then I will start on creating a simple environment to put my houses and small props in to show them off.

The Village Blog #12

For this week I mainly focused on cleaning up the UVs for my second house. The process of cleaning up the UVs for the house was quite simple but once again tedious when it comes to the windows. Regardless, I am definitely happy with the clean UVs that I have gotten by going through the repetitive process. 

Front Wall

Left Side Wall

Back Wall

Back Wall 2

Front Wall 2

Small Section of House

I have taken the advice of a fellow classmate and re-created the UVs for the fence. After developing a new style of making UVs for my model this became a simple process to do. 

Making the UVs for the rooftop on the triangles on the side of the houses was also a easy task to accomplish. With the amount of time left in the semester I have come to a realization that depending on how busy it gets with the remaining time that is left I may have to scratch the third house and focus on texturing my houses and putting them in a Unity scene. 

Castle on Wheels Blog #4

Continuing on from my last sprint, I managed to add the castle path to my level as well as the enemy placements. This took quite a while since I wanted to ensure that the castle path was smooth so the castle wouldn't look like it was turning corners too sharply. I had to modify my enemy placements compared to my last level since I only had a tiny bit of room to work since I have shrunk the terrain. 

After finishing the enemy placements and the path I have then added the nav mesh to my level. It was a simple process to do since I was already taught the steps to implement it on my last level. 

Eventually when our group reached Sprint 6, the level designers were on stand by as the programmers were implementing the code needed to have our levels work. I was assigned to work on the dust particle effect for the enemy stronghold to make it look like it was busy setting up more enemy troops to throw at the player. 

I was then tasked to add the block out props for level 4. I have pretty much copied the placement from my old level but with a few modifications to match the new terrain. There are now less enemy structures and normal structures than before. 

Currently, I am working on placing the new enemy spawners on my level and modifying them so whenever the player starts the level it would not immediately be flooded with enemies. 

The Village Blog #11

For this week I mainly wanted to focus on cleaning up the UVs for my first house, texturing it, and see how it would look in a Unity scene. After taking my instructors advice I finally found a proper way to straighten my UVs and also get rid of those red/blue spots on my maps. 

After attempting the easy way which is making some cuts to the UV to help straighten it I realized that this method was not going to work. For some reason it stretches out the corner of each wall making it real hard to straighten it out. 

After a few attempts to straighten out my UV I then figured out that I just need to redo my UV once again but this time with the window separated. This has shown great results which as you can see on the top my UVs are all straighten out. 

I then ran into another issue where there was some parts in the mesh where I had to separate each quad and sew them back together to create a clean UV.  This process was simple once you know the steps needed to create a clean UV but considering I have multiple windows to UV out I expected it to be a time consuming process. 

Although the process was a bit tedious I am happy with the results that turned out. I can now proudly say that my UVs are clean and straight compared to how they were last time. 

Back Wall of the House

Front Wall of the House

Bottom Connector

Roof

This is the final product of the house. I made sure to use up all the room that I can on this UV tile to ensure better quality when it comes down to texturing in Substance Painter. 

I am also happy that the red/blue spots that were previously seen on my UVs are now gone now and barely visible. 

After creating the ID for my model and setting it up to export into Substance Painter, I sadly realized that my membership with them has sadly timed out. I looked up other texturing programs I could use and remembered what my instructor recommended one time which is Quixel. 

They have a free texturing program which is called Mixer but sadly since this program is fairly new it does not support baking which is essential when it comes down to IDing and texturing certain parts of the model. For now it looks like I might just focus on attempting one house and depending on how long it takes I might just jump in creating my environment right away in Unity.