S5289584 Realtime environments Design journal.

 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 across the desert. The player will have to take down these bandits in a simple first person shooter style of game.

Walkthrough:

The town is small but the basic walkthrough will start the player outside the front fence.

Following through into the town players should move forward into the front section of the town on the left. 

Here you see the windmill and the first small building. Players should proceed around the town in a counter clockwise manner. 

Players will arrive at a larger building and a water tower, this area provides some good cover and a chance for some environmental interaction. (I would like to have the water tower be destructible in the level)

Turning around players will see a schoolhouse/barn style building and another smaller shack.

Making their way back players would see a large home and another smaller water tower. Exiting the town from where they came in.

Justification:

I chose to keep my design simple and in a cartoony style so it wouldn't be too hard to convey the feeling I was going for. As a typical western style town all of the buildings are made of mostly wood so i also.

Cartoon style/Quill software:

I chose a cartoon style for my environment because I wanted to make something visually interesting. I am still learning how to use some 3D modelling software and I thought that it would allow me to make something interesting within the amount of time I had. Because I am relatively unfamiliar with Maya I chose to use blender, but also use Quill VR, which is a virtual reality 3D modelling program. I did this for a couple of reasons: 1. Because I'm much more familiar with painting, using a program that is closer to sculpting/painting in 3D felt like a good choice and It aided in the cartoon style of the town. 2. It let me get a good idea of the scale of everything because I could be in it. 3. I was able to work much quicker than I could in Maya and be more creative with how I built the scene. There are a few drawbacks though. Because the models are basically hand drawn UV mapping was a pain and my initial idea of having pixel art textures was too time consuming to finish for the submission. So instead I textured the surfaces by painting on simple colours and added 3D outlines to everything, which really made the scene look like a cartoon. Because my style was simple I was able to create a lot of prefabs and construct buildings using them. After modelling in Quill VR I imported the files into blender to fix up some of the models as well as move some things around. In blender the scene looked pretty great after tweaking some material values.

Layout:

For the layout I wanted a small circle that the player could move around quickly but also where they could find a lot of cover. I took some inspiration from other shooter games like Dooms circular arenas and also looked at a lot of western town layouts in movies and real life. 

Whitebox in unity:

Unity:

I wanted to use unity because I knew that I could export from Quill VR and also Blender easily into unity and also because I'm more familiar with it than unreal. Before I modelled the scene I did a Whitebox in unity as well. Although unity is easy to use it seems to have come at a slight cost to the look of the environment. I spent a long time trying to get the materials from blender into unity exactly as they looked in blender but i wasn't able to, leaving the unity version looking a little bit worse. I also played around with lighting but wasn't able to make it work too well. I ended up using a shader to mimic the way the models looked in quill which I found online. I still don't understand the issue and will try to get the models looking like they do in blender for the final submission. 

Textures:

The textures in the environment are very simple because the cartoon lines do most of the heavy lifting in conveying the materials. I did this both to reduce the work I had to do with the UVs and also to make the buildings look hand drawn almost. The textures look really nice in blender, it's hard to pinpoint the difference from blender to unity but I think in blender everything looks softer and the lighting is much smoother. As well as all the colours being more vibrant. I did try texturing the buildings using pixel art which didn't work out too well but remaking each model in blender then UV mapping and texturing resulted in a nice pixel art look but i didn't have time to redo all the buildings. 

Completion plan:

As for the rest of the environment I plan to add:

• Better terrain using unity's terrain generation tools.

• 2-3 more building prefabs to expand the town.

• More props like boxes: Barrels, small fruits, weapons and more foliage.

• Some new lighting to bring the look of the scene closer to the look in blender.

• Some small physics objects: planks of wood and rocks that the player can interact with.

• Some particle effects.

• If possible some more pixel art textures to replace existing ones, though i will only do this if i can't get the scenes in blender and unity to look the same.

As for completing this, I plan to focus on getting the textures/lighting in unity to a place where I'm happy. If I can do that then I'll focus on making new buildings and props for the scene. If not I will switch to using pixel art textures for the scene meaning I'll have to create some new textures and models. I'll then expand the terrain in unity. After that's done I’ll move on to decorating more with physics objects and particles. Finally, I'll add some post processing and that should be it.

External assets used:

I created all the assets used but I did use a shader to correct the materials in unity. The shader is on the quill website and is not my creation.

Inspiration materials:

My inspirations were:

• Doom.

Doom uses very circular arenas where players move clockwise or counter clockwise in a flow around the arena.

• Compound VR

I just like how this game looks.

• Team fortress 2

TF 2 has a similar look to what I'm going for and has very well designed maps that use space and verticality well. 

• Rango

I wanted to emulate the vibe of Rango or at least have a similar town layout.

And images from the internet of western towns.

Reflection:

This environment was difficult to make, and some of the things I thought would make things easier just caused more problems down the road. The main challenge now is the process of going from Quill to unity and blender to unity and the changes between the programs. I want to have the unity environment look as good as it does in blender but i don't really know why they look so different. This is something I plan to figure out and fix before the final submission.