Final Battle Arena in Unity

So when I put the statue into the existing battle arena in Unity. It looked good but the old arena still needed updating. In the process of doing this I had to update Unity. For some reason when I opened the project again all of the materials had broken and were not fixable. So I had to make a new project. I do not regret this choice as it meant I could start off with the new arena model straight away. I applied all the textures and animated the camera. This time I added in more lights and some alarm lights. I decided to make the ground have blended materials but there was no way to do this in unity without buying a software. I scoured the internet for a solution and found one. I downloaded a vertex painter with blend shaders and got a texture for the ground that I liked. However, for this blended material to appear in the build I have to place a duplicate of the ground object into the scene and not do anything else before building. If I change something after placing in the object, the material does not work. I have used emmisive maps on the crystals to make them glow for extra effect. Lastly, I added in a few sound effects and some music that I have used in a previous project. I also animated a few of the alien ships in the scene to add to the story a little bit and make the arena less static. I am really happy with the way the camera moves through the scene and I like how some of the story is shown throughout the arena.

There is a particle effect that I am really happy with for figuring out myself. On one of the spaceship engines I have made a particle effect for heat distortion. It has been made using the glass material shader and a normal map I made from some random generated clouds in Photoshop. I wanted to mention it because I am very happy with the effect.

Finally, I thought I'd show the final statue in Unity. I have used such a bright light coming in from the left because it shows the detail of the normal map really well and makes the scene more dramatic. I am pleased with the way it turned out.

Battle Arena Changes

I am making some changes to my battle arena to make it look better and for the story to show through in it more. I am also changing it to accommodate for the statue. I need to update some of the textures also to be higher resolution because it will look odd with a high resolution statue next to a very low resolution environment. Previously I made a single texture for the terrain so that I could have ambient occlusion on it. However, I need a tilable texture to get more detail around the statue area. I have decided to make it a blend shader to get even more variation in the environment. I could make it in Maya but I would just have to recreate it in Unity so I have decided to make the new texture once I have got the FBX version of the arena into Unity. I will however, render out UV and ambient occlusion maps for the new models as I make them.
I have an idea to better lead the viewer through the arena. I will use an alien spaceship with a spotlight to highlight areas of the map as the camera travels round it as it is particularly hard to see the arena in the current Unity build. To start changing the arena I added in some spaceships above the arena and also some crystals to show the mineral that is being mined. I also added a tiny bit more detail to the statue's base. Here is the new arena model.

Battle Arena Finished - Showcase

To showcase my battle arena I imported it into unity. The process of doing this requires me to apply all of the textures I made to materials in unity. This is a lengthy process and required me to adjust the textures in Photoshop as I went along. I made the normal maps at this stage because it was easier to see what they would look like in Unity than in Maya.
At first I intended to have the sun casting shadows across the map but changed my mind because it didn't feel very atmospheric. So I made it night time and added height fog to the world. I animated a camera to do a fly through of the map but it still felt like it was missing something. That's when I decided to add particles systems and some lights. There aren't many lights but they make the world look like it had been inhabited. I added a duststorm particle system and altered the colour of it which gives the illusion of wind moving the fog. Then I added fire systems to the major impact points of the alien bombing ships. This really adds atmosphere to the map.
Here is a screenshot of the scene in unity.

Overall I am really happy with my battle arena. In future I will make my models with a slightly higher poly count because these ones are very low poly and you can get more detail if you use more.
Here is a shot of the final build in unity.

Battle Arena Finished - Textures

So once I'd finished the models I created UV maps to allow me to create textures. This is where I was thankful that I modelled in a low polygon style because I had less polygons to stitch together in the UV map. Nonetheless, it still took a long time to UV map every model in the arena. 

In total there needed to be 24 textures to be used on the models. For each of these textures I needed an albedo, and ambient occlusion map. For the more important models I would need a normal map and possibly a specular map. For one of the models I ended up needing an emissive map too. For most of the textures I started with the uv snapshot and ambient occulsion render taken from Maya. Then I made a layer consisting of one colour behind these and a layer on top of this of a picture of rust. I created a layer mask on this layer and began to make the rust show in areas that made sense. Here is a screenshot of the bridge texture and the Photoshop layers to accompany it. This is a good representation of how I structured most of the textures.

Here are the textures added using lambert materials in Maya.

All of these textures are applied to these models in unity via specular setup materials.

Battle Arena Finished - Modelling

Over the past term at uni I have been working on the battle arena. The previous post showed the arena in a greybox form. This post will go over the models for the arena. To start here is the entire arena rendered out from Maya.

I've made a few changes since you saw it last. The most notable being the surrounding mountains. I made this change because initially I planned to showcase the map using a 3rd person character in unity. However, once I had got the initial map into unity for testing, I discovered that my model style was too low polygon for third person. This is because the player was tiny in relation to the models and unless I made the player a giant there wasn't a solution other than remaking the models. So I changed the idea of the game this arena would be used for. The game would now be a top down RTS. So I added the mountains to surround the map.

Since you last saw the map I also added a bridge in the middle of the map. This was because I felt that there was a space that needed filling where the bridge now is. I also populated the map with rock piles and containers/crates to make it feel more used.

Battle Arena Greybox

The first term of the 3D Art Production Course entails creating a battle arena. As part of this project we must create a grey box version of our arena.

The idea of my arena is an abandoned mining operation. A corporation found an incredibly valuable resource buried on an asteroid underneath an ancient alien structure. However, after weeks of mining and the destruction of much of the sacred alien structure, one of the untouched structures came to life. It sent a beam of light up into the sky and part of it began floating. A day passed and nothing happened. Just as the corporation thought they were safe gigantic spiked rockets fell from the sky, aiming all over the facility. They struck at enormous speeds, ravaging the structures and vehicles. The remaining workers went into panic and tried to flee the facility. They did not escape. From the falling ships came hordes of alien monsters which tore the workers apart. Although the angered aliens destroyed the facility they made a fatal mistake. The facility was on a remote asteroid, so they had to keep fuel with them. They stored it in large tanks which were designed to withstand a lot. One of the smaller alien ships went straight into the central tank. It exploded and the expanding cloud of fire killed everything still living on the asteroid. The sight of the decrepit mine now is eerie.

For now we are just grey boxing our arena. Later on in the course we will make a statue to go in the arena. I have left a podium overlooking the mine to put a statue on. I think it will be of one of the aliens that the structure belonged too.
I'm really happy with how it turned out but I think maybe there should be more in the mine area.
Here are several images of my arena. Starting with the mood-board.