Let start off with a super brief overview, as this project differs from that of a traditional 495 game. I was assigned to work on a educational earthquake game, which focuses heavily on disaster relief and mitigation of loss of life and infrastructure due to aftershocks. This has the potential to turn into a government funded project, and our requirements for this class were also modified. We only needed to have a prototype to show off at the end of the year, instead of a fully finished game. After the designer and producer contacted the USGS, we had to change our design document. Likewise we had a solid week of preproduction, with traditional sprints not starting until the 2nd week.
I was chosen to be one of the four 3D artists on this project. What I primarily did was model and texture over this sprint, but its highly likely I will be shifted to being the full time texture artist.
I started prototyping how these could potentially work, and I ended up making a fitting on both ends, making it very individual pipes very clear. This is the bottom pipe seen in the top photo.
I ended up initial making 3 different pipes. But this would later grow to match my productivity. I started prototyping how these could potentially work, and I ended up making a fitting on both ends, making it very individual pipes very clear. This is the bottom pipe seen in the top photo.
I'll show the final UV map at the end, but as you can tell from the first painter scene, there was a significant amount of props on a single texture map. The Producer and Designer did not yet know what texture resolution they wanted yet, as we were still in preproduction. So I painted everything in 4k, as they weren't sure if they wanted high resolutions or not. This workflow made it so I could very easily downscale the textures if needed. They initially asked for a "3k" texture map for a placeholder, and I informed them it be easier if we just worked at 4k and would downscale if needed.
The majority of the pipes were around 800 tris, and were built with quads. No NGons are present, and they all have clean edge flows. Nothing was subdivided, as I was pretty confident that I could texture the pipes to a significant degree of quality. The reason why the pipes even have such a initially high resolution to begin with, was because we weren't sure if the game was going to be in first person or have a birds eye view. If the player was going to directly interact with pipes to fix them in a first person perspective, they had to be detailed looking.
What was clear from the get go was that we wanted to use PBR Texture Maps. Which allowed me to make the pipes far more realistic, while still having a slight stylized view. One of the greatest limitation factors while texturing, was actually due to the UV. The individual UV map was great, but to fit the requested amount of props on one map, I had to heavily utilize shell stacking. If I made damage along the hole of the pipe seen above, that damage would also be shown on all the normal pipes.
The Quad pipe was by far the hardest to create, due to also needing to fit with a 1x1 meter grid. during the modeling stage we still weren't sure the quality of or level of detail we were looking for; so all the pipes have interiors. The 5 Modular Pipes would add up to around 2000 tris if we removed all the inner faces.
All the work above I modeled, UVed, and textured myself. The Fire Hydrant and Light Pole props below, I simply textured and re organized their UVs. They were modeled by other people on the team.
I added a ton of additional details as well using height and normal maps, and I was quite excited with the end product. The light pole is more simplistic and and basic in nature, and can be viewed at the top of this blog.
This map, referred to as UV Map 3, includes the regular, damaged, curved, end piece, and quad pipes; as well as the fire hydrant and the light pole. Shell stacking was heavily utilized, with 80% of all pipe shells being in the bottom left quadrant. I was pretty happy with the level of optimization I was able to achieve.
In total, I was able to complete a whopping 19 points this sprint, which I was pretty happy with, as the begging is usually a bit slower while everything is getting set up.
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