Games Incubator

The goal for this project was to create models and texture for a game with a procedurally generated map. My personal focus was on creating efficient models in terms of topology, poly count and textures as well as how to best make models that can be easily connected together so they can easily be procedurally generated in the game.

With the plan that the game would be a dungeon crawler where the player would travel through rooms and hallways, I decided the best place to start would be to figure out how exactly the hallways and rooms would work.

Above is a cross section of the straight room piece I ruffed out and the red section represents the connection points for each room piece, it was also in the phase that I realized that the best way to make all rooms connect would be to place the connection points on the north and east side of each piece that way it would always connect without issue.

With the block outs done I then had to deiced the best approach for turning the block out into models that could be used in the game. My conclusion to this was to break down what models I would need to create each room, things like pillars, walls, door frames and support beams. By making all of these things before hand it would allow me to quickly and easily throw together basic rooms with a unified style that I could then later on decorate with models.

These where the first models designed for the rooms they where created by first making a ruff block out of each, I would then create a high detailed version of the block outs, next I took the high detailed version and use them to create clean topology with a low poly count to which I could finish by baking the high detailed version onto the low poly giving the result you see above. One Idea I deiced to use whilst making the models was to combine similar models uv maps so they could all share the same material, this came with multiple advantages like I could easily fill out the uv maps without leaving lots of empty space, I could more easily control the resolution of each model so all models pixel sized wouldn’t vary and all the models share the same textures meaning we can save on space in the project. The most important part of the UV mapping was trying to keep the texture seams in the places where the player is least likely to see them, for example on the arches the texture seam is on the top as the player would only ever see them from below.

With the first set of piece made I then moved on to using them to fill out the block outs of the basic rooms. This process went along quickly and gave me a good idea of what piece I was missing form the current set of models. This was the result of placing all the models I’d made.

When I initially started working on this project I also focused on making more interesting tiling materials as in the images above you can see that the tile flooring and the brick walls have very little variation. Originally however I made two version of each tiling texture one which was a clean version and one which was dirty and full of crack, I would then use a simple mask to blend between the two which would create and varied and interesting effect. However this was dropped when the group decided to switch render pipelines meaning I could no longer work on this method of texturing in this project.

With a lot of the core design element done for the rooms I started working on character designs and models that would could be used for the game, at the time we started working on the idea we hadn’t fully decided on a theme for the game but instead a general outline for different things we wanted in the game one of which was a Valkyrie so that was the first character I started to work on.

Once again I focused on flowing topology and a low poly count. Another important thing I focused on was making notes of base colour, roughness and metallic values for different materials to make sure I could easily keep a persistent design.

With the completion of the character it was obvious of some fatal design issue when it came to combing the rigged model with the animations we had which thanks to difference in bind poses created some rather noticeable visual issues with the model. With this in mind I started to work on the main character model which would fix these issues.

With the lessons of the previous model in mind this character was made to better mach the skeletal rig to fix the issues with the animation of the previous character. Unlike the last character this character was designed with a few different rules, first of all this character was supposed to be the main character so I made it with customization in mind leaving him almost naked with no hair and blank eyes, this was done to allow for some basic customization as well as changeable Armour that could easily be added to model. This model was also kept to a low poly count 6192 Tris making it performance friendly