As someone aspired to work in the gaming industry, I challenged myself to use only my own models for this first project. I opened up a shrine I modeled before and started doing the UVs, but I quickly realize I don’t have enough time to do this in a week along other courses, so I settled on the auto UV feature for many parts of the mesh. The first screenshot is an optimized UV I created myself, and the second screenshot is an example of an auto-generated UV in Maya, which is not ideal, but usable.
I downloaded textures from textures.com, also created my own texture for the roof and the lamp in Substance Painter. I modified them in PS to made sure they are consistent in style.
To make the overall environment more natural, I added some default trees from unity assets, to give the sense of the shrine’s solitude in the woods.
Most of my previous works are rendered in Maya with Vray, mostly aiming at achieving semi-photo-realistic characters(work-in-progress render above). I have no experience in creating optimized textures and models for a game(limited poly-count, resolution, cached simulations etc.). I was excited about learning in-depth optimization of models and textures in Unity(including caching and real-time simulations), but I realize the class’ main focus is on assessing interpretations of the gaming experience and designing experimental games that only touches the surface of the technical aspect. For me personally, the common mysterious and abstract designs of experimental games is a cover-up for the lack of technical/artistic skills or lazy game-making, but I do recognize most of these games are independent. For me, experimental games are like modern art, overly praised for the effort put into it. Although not exactly what I was expecting, the class offers experience in Unity, which I am looking forward to.