Game Scene Blog 1 - Blocking & Reference

This is the start of my game scene blog. Out of the three choices given (the other two being Call of Duty and Witcher 3), I decided to go with the Protoss Base from StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, a real-time strategy game by Blizzard. I like the more stylized, artistic style of StarCraft over the other options so I'm hoping to practice it through this project. While I've played games of this genre before, I've never played StarCraft so I was unsure how to arrange my scene at first. However, after looking at some references and receiving advice from my boyfriend (who has played the game before), I think I have a good idea how the assets should be set up when making a base in game. Any advice / suggestions are welcome in case I have something mixed up.

Below is my current blocking (the required objects are color coordinated to make things easier to see) and some of the reference shots I used.

• Yellow frustum: Nexus
• Green rectangle: Assimilator
• Light blue rectangle: Forge
• Dark blue pyramid: Gateway
• Light purple diamond: Pylons
• Dark purple rectangles: Minerals
• Light brown: Cliffs / Rocky terrain
• Dark green surface: Ground (rock + dirt + grass)

Blocked out scene

 

Protoss Base reference #1

Protoss Base reference #2

Gun Update #3 - Final

And so the low-poly gun is complete! The high poly is 2500 verts and 4892 tris (maximum limit is 10k tris) and the low poly is 1211 verts and 2346 tris (maximum limit is 3k tris). I used Maya 2016 to model and Substance Painter to bake and texture. Because I baked the normals within Substance and then textured the gun instead of using the Transfer Maps method, I did not need to extensively UV the high poly gun (hence why the UV looks so drastically different than the low-poly).

My biggest problem was with texturing. I decided I wanted to use Substance Painter to texture the gun. I've used Substance Painter when I took CAGD 495 so I am familiar with the program. However, I discovered that at this moment in time Substance and Maya do not see eye to eye due to Substance's use of PBR and originally the maps looked horrible when imported into Maya. Currently there are some workarounds floating around forums, especially in Maya 2016 which has a custom Substance shader within the Hypershade, however the process is extensive and I could not figure it out. Thanks to some advice from friends I discovered exporting the maps from Substance Painter using the Corona preset (which exports the color as Diffuse instead of Albedo) gave me the best result, even if the outcome was a lot lower quality than how it looked in Substance.

Renders

Wireframe (side view)

Wireframe (3/4ths view)

UV (low and high)

Diffuse, Normal, and AO

Gun Update #2 - UVing and Texturing

Hi all.

Since last week, I've altered my base mesh, separating the metallic scope piece from the gun's main body. This gives the mesh a lot more definition (and made UVing a lot easier) so I'm happy I decided to go this route. My UVs are also completed. The high poly sits at 4892 tris (maximum limit is 10k tris) and the low poly is 2384 tris (maximum limit is 3k tris).  I am in the middle of texturing in Substance Painter at the moment. Currently it's very basic but I've got the core colors down.

Gun High Poly (4892 tris)

Gun Low Poly (2384 tris)

Low Poly UV

Texturing in Substance Painter

Low Poly Barrel

Low poly (left) and high poly (right)

Top view

UVs

Diffuse, Normal, and AO

Here is my final product for my low-poly barrel assignment. In this assignment I modeled and UVed a high poly barrel comprised of 6520 tris and created diffuse, normal, and ambient occlusion textures for it. Using Maya's Transfer Maps, I then took the textures from the high poly and baked them onto a low poly mesh of 360 tris. I used CrazyBump to generate the normal map and Photoshop to add slight edits to it (ex. altering the metal bars so the normal did not come out as extreme as the wood texture). I also had to alter my high poly UVs due to my texture of choice. Because I was modeling a set of planks rather than just a wooden texture, I needed each piece on the lid to cover one plank, thus forcing me to stretch the lid slightly.

Gun Update #1

This is my current status on the gun assignment. The high poly and low poly are currently different because I'm in the process of altering the high poly and was not able to update the low poly in time (most notable in the housing body, where the arms are now detached from the scope as seen in the high poly). I'm going to also break the barrel casing as a separate piece from the main body of the gun, which is not shown at the moment.