Sprint 4 Overview

 Sprint 4 has officially concluded, and I am quite happy with the amount of work that both myself, and my group, were able to complete.

Besides redoing a few basic models from others when issues arose, all of the work I did for the sprint was exclusively texturing and UVing. The "Small Bridge" was one of the first things I tackled, and turned out well. The reference I was given indicated it was quite old, and the copper had begun to take on a nice green patina, so I tried to resemble that appearance as much as I could

As usual, all of our models are insanely low poly, so I tried to work with normal maps as much as possible to add more depth. In the bridge's case, this was adding ornamental and structural supports on the side, as well as bolts.

I baked and textured the universal tire which I had modeled during Sprint 3. This will be used all wheeled vehicles, so it was important that the poly count was beyond low. Even from a distance you will clearly be able to tell its not a circle; but using a high poly baking and more normal map work, I believe I got it looking pretty decent given the parameters.

After this I covered the trash can, which had a rather unique and stylized look. It was rather difficult to get its unique shape baked onto a simple cylinder, but I felt like the end result was decent given such a low poly base

This sprint I also began to work on the signs, of which we currently plan on having around 10.

The stop sign is by far the most universal and recognizable, I eventually ended up removing the grime as it really did not feel like it fit the setting.

The Road Work, Parking, and Bus stop signs were done next. All of which use different models for the sign itself, but each sign actually uses the same base. This was not originally the plan, but I saw I opportunity to opitmize and save space of the texture map, so I went ahead and improved the UVs.

I did have to redo the stop sign Mesh and UV, as there seemed to be some level of corruption from the original one I was given. The geometry was rather basic, and did not take a significant amount of time to complete.

While making the trash bag, we ended up having a pretty big shift in terms of the visual we wanted. The first variant had much more things going about on the texture, but we eventually settled on something more plain and dirty.

Another road related prop I textured was the road barrier. This was a more classical based one, being made out of wood, and just having some simple paint. As oppose to a modern barricade that is plastic and has reflectors on it.

From here we go onto something more organic, or at least, as organic as you can get while making props for a city; plant boxes!

Both of these used CC0 royalty free sprites of plants, as we wanted something rather photorealistic, while also saving time. This was I only needed to create the box and dirt, and did not need to worry about significant masking work for the plant itself.

Because we used masked pngs for the plants, I did not need to utilize Alpha channels in this point of the project, so texturing was very streamline.

Now we getting onto the vehicles. The majority of which I believe turned out pretty well. The blockier based ones such as the van and ambulance suffered far less from the low poly. The Tesla on the other hand, is by far the weakest of any of the vehicles.

It's such a smooth a curvy vehicle, the low poly models we were working with simply don't display it's style in correct manner. The good news is that it will mostly be viewed from a top down angle, which is a significantly better perspective. You also can't have cars without a street lamp:

The model was given to me in a modular state, but the textures will be applied the same regardless. I gave the lights proper reflective materials, but did not color any of them. We aren't sure if we wanted working lights, and if we did, they would most likely be added in Unity. Regardless, it would be easy to go back and color them in if we decide it is needed.

Now back to the vehicles!

The van I had a lot of fun with. And by fun, I mean a ton of hand painting as the was very little topology to use for mapping. By utilizing lots of normal maps, I was able to add significant levels of depths that made the vehicles look far more realistic. None of these vehicles utilized high poly bakes, so they took me significantly longer to texture compared to other models of similar detail.

Lastly, We have the two ambulances:

Now you might be wondering, why do we have two ambulances? I made a rather rookie mistake by not opening the card and looking at its attached material. I am very familiar with the EMS ambulances in San Francisco, which are privately owned. The actual ambulances, which are run by the city hospitals, have a very different color scheme. By the time I noticed my mistake, I had already completed the first ambulance, so we decided we would keep it and use it in the game as well.

This concludes my Sprint 4 overview; I believe I did almost 30 points worth of cards, and I can say with confidence that I will be attempting to lower my output by at least a little bit for future sprints. The vehicles took far longer than expected, and I ran into an interesting issue in terms of not knowing how high quality to make them. They could always be better, but I realized at the end of the day players will be seeing these from 200 feet away, so it simply did not make sense to pour in a higher level of detail.