Realtime environments blog

 Overall, my scene came out good. At first, I set my goals and came up with an idea, although I didn't fully realize hose goals, I came pretty close and learned a lot about the process. My scene was modelled in quill VR and slightly edited in blender; I chose this workflow because I thought it would be easier than modelling things in maya. I thought this because of my general unfamiliarity with maya and also because i had modeled in Quill before. For me it was also more fun in quill. This way of working was more fun, but it led to a fair few problems during development. I first attempted to use unity to run my scene, but this proved difficult due to the way unity's lighting works and the way its materials work. These issues were exacerbated by my models very poor optimization which slowed everything down. These issues arose because I tried to skip crucial steps in development, ultimately costing me more time.   The Quill to unity method had many issues so instead of tryin...

 Today I added some decorations and new meshes to my scene. I modelled some cacti, a small graveyard, added another building and cleaned up the terrain a lot. I chose to add these mostly to add a sense of fullness to the scene, it felt slightly baron before but now it feels more lived in. I added some empty beer bottles as well to enhance the sense that this place had been lived in.  My largest undertaking was cleaning up my meshes, before the clean-up my scene was very unoptimized and was sitting at about 6 million tris, even though it's a low poly scene, so I wanted to clean that up not only so it would run better both in editor and in unreal but also to make the exporting and importing process much less laborious. I was able to use quill to optimize my meshes by layer, so I optimized each mesh to a point where it lost little quality but increased performance. This was easy for the boxy shapes but much more difficult to rounded shapes. Some of those more rounded shapes came ...

  Design journal: Backstory: My environment takes place in the wild west, it’s a simple cartoony world where buildings are cobbled together and the heat is oppressive. In the vast desert water is a commodity and is stored in tanks for storage. This town is recently abandoned and only really exists as a liminal space for wayward travellers in their hero's journey. The kind of place where deadly shootouts may go down but not the kind of town inhabited by hard working folk. The town lies within a small valley and is cut off from most of the rest of the world, its isolation only exacerbated by its position in a vast desert. Originally the town was home to a small community of laborers but slowly the town's people left or disappeared, mostly due to its secluded spot and low resource availability. Now the town is often home to outlaws and gangs who need a place to stay the night. Though visitors don't often return. When the player finds this town it is inhabited by bandits moving...