weekly update 3

Time for a new update on the project. It's been awhile since the last update and a lot has happened  So here is a overview of the different things I worked on.

Coral
To make the scenery a bit more interesting we need quite a lot of decoration. Since yesterday the main focus lies in that part of the project and the first results are these (together with some other props for the pike):

The textures are quitte interesting. We used grayscale maps with a gradient to help blend the models better with the seafloor. Also in unity we are able to give custom colors to the models.

Seafloor
We desperately needed an update on the seafloor. The first mock-ups were really bad and boring. So a spend one and a half day on some new tiles as a start. We can easily expand this set to give some more variation if necessary.

These parts are created semi-procedural. I used GeoControl2 to procedurally create a landscape I liked.

Next I exported a heightmap from it and used this in zbrush as an alpha-map on a brush to sculpt the details on a tileable base shape. This way I had some control over what parts got what details. Next step was to use decimation master to get the polycount down to around 16.000 tris which will be manageable in Unity.

The last step was in Maya to clean up the edges of the tiles to make them tileable again. The brushing step in Zbrush messed this up a bit so that needed to be fixed.

Book
This sunday I found myself close to the University library in Utrecht so I thought I should visit and check if they had a book I wanted. To my surprise they were actually open and they also had the book! It's called Texturing & Modeling; a Procedural Approach. I haven't really dived into it yet but i'm really excited to see if there is something usefull in there.

Implemented the music player
There is also some news on the music player from last post. We fully implemented it in the game already. So now you can go and find a LP somewhere in the ship and use it to play music on the music player.

Filling the rooms with water
This part gave Martijn and me some real troubles. We needed some kind of mesh that would fill up the rooms when needed. Though we couldn't just scale up some kind of shape to fill it because most rooms had strange shapes in the walls. Especially the bridge had a strange shape. First we tried all kinds of blend shapes. Even though that worked like a charm in Maya, we couldn't use it in Unity. Next we tried to use some bone animation, but that was hell to animate in Maya. We tried some other things as well, but in the end we found some custom script for Unity that could make a kind of blend shapes. The script uses the different shapes needed and blends between them. Though we still got some trouble with vertices that disappeared when clustered to close. In the end it worked. That was a real eureka moment!

Little fish
And to end this post I like to present a little fish I made to represent the lost Royal Carp of the King:

Until next time!

Rick