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.
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.
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.
