Modular Game Scene

 Week 5 Progress Post

    The end goal of this project was to create a game scene replicating the style of Warcraft 3 Reforged. One the models were created they were imported into Unity and set in a scene. I tried to convey with my game scene a hidden castle high in the mountains that would be difficult to travel to. I had similar issues throughout the design of this project. There were multiple times when I would create an object and attempt to UV it and discover there is some bad geometry in the construction of the object. I was able to fix and recover some of the models by removing ngons and extra edge loops. But there were a few times where I was unable to fix the geometry of the object and was forced to start from the beginning on the model. This project took me 100+ hours to complete. Many of the extra hours were due to issues with UV’s or bad geometry. This project did face me with multiple challenges that would take me hours to diagnose and resolve. But now if I run into similar issues going forward I should be able to quickly diagnose and fix the project. Overall I feel the scene adequately conveys what I originally set out to do with the design of the project. I was able to replicate the style of my reference successfully, UV my models, texture the objects, construct a mountainous  terrain and add foliage in Unity to set a scene.

 

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Week 4 Progress Post

    Initially I thought these last few objects would be relatively easy to make. The remaining objects I had to make were the gate for the entrance to the castle, a wall, a tower, bell tower and central building. The wall seemed like a very straightforward object using simple shapes. But it turned out to be far more tedious than I thought it would be. While making it I repeatedly created ngons. I finally broke it into many different parts and put them together rather than making a section of it into one part. The tower and bell tower were relatively easy to create. Once the tower was completed I used the structure to create the bell tower. The central building didn’t take very long at all to create but all the while I was creating these objects I was making sure to UV them. When I was finally finished modeling everything I went back to create my UV sheet and lay out all the objects onto one sheet. This is where I ran into serious issues with the project. When I pulled my objects into a uv sheet and tried to lay them out I began to run into manifold issues. Tracking down where the issues with my UV’s were took an immense amount of time. Once I was able to finish my UV’s and started to texture my object I realized I was going to run into another issue with my project. I created the castle's exterior modularly with the intention of creating duplicates and moving them around the central buildings to make the walls. But when adding textures to the wall segments and sliding bits of them around I realized that it would cause issues with the textures. I instead textures parts of the wall so they weren’t connected and could be added where I needed them.

 

 

 

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Week 3 Progress Post

 

    During week three I began working on the water fountain I planned to use for this scene. This was both an easy and difficult piece to create. I began creating the object by using the curve tool. I traced out the shape I wanted from the reference art. Once I had the shape I needed for the object I revolved the curve to make the object and reversed the mesh to have the faces in the correct direction. After creating the object I was trying to decide how I would fill the basin of the fountain. I decided on selecting all the inner faces of the basin and extracting them. Once I had inner basin faces extracted I duplicated them and used a fill hole/poke face to make the top of what would be the water. This worked out and I continued this process for the remaining basins for the water fountain. This was also the point in the project where I started working on the turret for the castle. I took the turret I’d already created and removed the stairs and door leading into the object. I then removed the top of the turret as the design was different from the design on the castle turrets. I extracted from the existing center column to make the inner shape of the castle turret. Once I’d felt I’d make some progress with the castle turret I tried to UV the object but very quickly discord many extra edge loops were created from the extruding process. I spent quite a bit of time removing the extra edge loops and double faces. I also decided to break some of the structure into modular pieces. I duplicated over some of the modular pieces and reused them on the castle turrets. Getting the castle turret modeled correctly and UV’d took up the majority of my allotted time for this week of progress and set me back quite a bit going into the next week of work.

 

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Week 2 Progress Post

    In the second week I began working on the turret model. I began by trying to make the turret as one piece for a majority of the structure. I started from a square, added subdivisions and extruded out to form the design of the turret. After making it half way through this object I discovered this wasn’t the best approach to making the bulk of the turret. As I began to bevel the turret and add more curves to the singular peace I started to develop many ngons. After running into issues I started to make the turret in a more modular style breaking down the overall structure into smaller pieces than I originally intended. Once I had the main section of the turret completed I began working on the small embellishments like windows, the door and the flag pool at the top. I made sure to create this as individual objects because I planned to use them as parts of the other objects. With slight modifications I felt I could use the door as the entrance for the castle as well. At this point in the project I also began UV’ing. I began by breaking up the flagpole into parts that would use different textures and extracted the faces. Overall working on the turret and getting the geometry correct without any ngons took around 8 hours to complete. The next piece I planned to work on for the following week would be a water fountain and would be the last prop piece I would need for my scene.

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Week 1 Progress Post

    The goal of this project is to keep a progress report of the process when making a game scene in Maya. During this project I will be creating a game scene with models in the style of Warcraft 3 Reforged. The models will be composed of a few buildings and set pieces. The initial step was to find a reference of which building I would like to recreate. I decided to create the Alliance castle, guard turret, flag post and a fountain. I began the process by breaking down how I would construct each model. I deconstructed each model into smaller parts to be able to construct the model in its entirety. Once I had an idea of who I was going to deconstruct each model, I looked at each piece and tried to determine if any of the components could be shared between models. The Alliance castle and the turret had many elements in common and decided I would use the turret as a base for the castle. Before I started working on the larger set pieces I started working on the flag post. This turned out to be a relatively easy object to construct, although once I had my initial model completed there was an issue with maya and I had to start over. But after gaining some practice from the initial build I was able to build it a second time far quicker than the initial build. The most challenging part was how I was going to create the cloth element that hangs in front of the sign. I decided to deviate from the reference material and give the flag portion a different design. The process of creating this first model took about 4 hours to complete. Going forward I will begin progress on the turret that will make up the base of the project.

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