20121121

Style Development ( Rendering )


This is my first render environment test for the game. I've used a warm ambient surround and a cold/green tinted invisible floor (imitating grass) combined with a top down white directional light. I have gone for an ambient occlusion style of lighting to give the models depth, but not from any particular direction, this will allow me later to implement models in different rotations and not look out of place from the lighting setup; it also lets me bake lightmaps when the level is complete causing no shadow overlapping issues.
I've removed the phong tag completely from the displaced spheres, this shows off the geometry of the model to its full potential. This test was using quite a high-poly model.
 

This is a test of a possible font I could create for the logo/in-game titles. It is Helvetica created through a font spline and extruded, then converting the spline to an editable spline and reducing its maximum anchor point angle to produce a simplified, original and almost hand made feel to the text.

This is a test of an actual in-game asset, the mesh has been optimised to have unseen faces removed, and has been UV mapped to allow for the surface colours you see in this render actual baked on to the model. This means technically I don't have to worry about lighting inside Unity as I can prepare each model before importing it in; this also means the game will run faster, if all materials are using unlit then they do not have to compute lighting etc.

I decided to look at how I could procedurally generate this model to produce variations using the same texture sheet, same mesh but scripting my 3D program to randomly place the tree branches for each new tree. This worked well, but I believe it is something we should apply inside Unity as this method would not make use of Unity's mesh instantiation process. (If you use two of the same meshes, it only has to generate one of them.)