But still a good solution.
I spent most of the week finishing building my dungeon. I didn’t get to anything else. Even with the extra day, that freed up, I still feel behind and like I’m scrambling a bit. That said. Building a dungeon is a lot of fun. It really is.
I finished the build out of the dungeon in 3DS Max. It was easiest for me to add the last bits there and get some materials attached. In addition to finish laying out the floor and walls I decided to make vents to go all the way around the top of the walls just under the ceiling. Then I just made 3 slabs for the roof. I thought about making it arched like in a tin can or submarine and decided not to this time.
Then I started adding materials to everything. This was a little tricky as my intention was to have two different materials on the walls. One material for the trim sort of work and another for everything else. I can do that. It just means that I have to assign the material to the face or polygon. And I end up with different material groups. Not usually and issue but a little messy for this project. I thought I was doing good. I got all the materials applied and was ready to export it to go into Unity.
It turns out that the export from 3DS Max to the .fbx file type for Unity don’t quite take all the materials as I thought. I loaded my dungeon up into Unity and…wait. Huh? That’s not right. Yep everything looked wrong. It looked like the color of the materials came over just not the texture part. I poked at it in Unity for a bit with no luck. Then I tried several times, to create UV’s in 3DS Max to see if that was the problem. That was even less helpful. I did consider finding a tutorial on the process. I fully intend to watch one at a later time. However, for now I decided I’d see if I could find some materials on the Unity Asset Store. I thought I had seen something there that might work.
I did. I found a lovely set of free PBR metal materials. As a friend said, at least something close to this, people who post free materials online are gods. They are awesome. I agree with her. Oh and before I forget. The PBR stands for physically based rendering. It’s the type of render system Unity uses and several other programs as well. It essentially means much better textures, and more realistic. They tend to beat some of the scanned textures from ages and days of old. A mere, what two to five years ago?
Armed with my materials I set about making my dungeon look good. It took so much longer than I expected. Finding the right metal pattern and then getting the right tiling and also coloring. It took the rest of that evening just to find the right materials for the walls and the grates in the floor. I had to finish applying them to the rest of everything the next day before I moved on to the lighting.
So lighting is probably a whole story all on its own. I’ll try to keep it short. It’s another
process that took so much longer than I expected. I prefer the look of the realistic lights, at least on the PC. But when I put them on the phone, they didn’t show up. It took me many hours of refining the lights, creating more lights, getting them bright enough and properly placed and then, oh so many light baking sessions to finally figure out, that for the phone, I have to bake all the lights. It gives me closest to the look I want. Baking the lights just means that all the lighting effect is composited into the wall material when the application is built and not calculated and displayed when the application is running. It makes the application run a bit faster. However, because I’ve got so many lights in the scene and so many walls, the light processing time takes a good 10 minutes. So I hit the button and go get something to drink.
I’m now to the point that I’m ready to add some movement and the interaction to the dungeon. I’m getting close but my user testing tells me I need to go back and tweak a couple of things. Most notably I need to tweak some of the lighting. Yes, I cringed inside at this suggestion. However, I understand the reason and I’ll give it a go. Maybe I’ll get ice cream while it’s processing.
As I said. This is all I’ve had a chance to work on this week. I’ve even tried to work on it in my sleep. No. Seriously. At least once, maybe twice this week I’ve woken up thinking about this project. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I don’t have a lot of art to show this week but I’ve got some work in progress screen shots that I’ve poked throughout this post. I’m coming up on the due date so I’ll be working hard on it again this week as well so there will be more to see next week. And hopefully a triumphant note of having finished it.