Sprint 6 Overview

 

There were no major issues during this sprint, and we had recovered fully from any problems that we found during Sprint 5. This was my lowest point completion I had done so far on the project, but still more then enough to satisfy 2 weeks worth of work. I had a large presentation to conduct, which to the vast majority of my free time. When it came to Sprint 6, I decided to simply do a normal amount of work, so I could contribute my time to other academic projects

All the cards I did were for texturing, with the majority of them regarding houses. The house model was a bit more suburban like in design, compared to the previous residential structures we have completed. I did have a minor setback when starting to actual texture the houses though once the models had been sent to me. There was multiple UV shells stacking over each other. This was on a flat wall, so I could hide it somewhat easily, but, it also meant that I could not do any bakes on the model. As the AO map and others would quickly reveal the issues of the overlaying shells. Because of this the house does not utilize a bake, as the high poly also had this issue. This was also modeled during the stage when we were cutting down on tris even more then we usually did, so each wall was pretty much just two triangles.

This was a issue as it meant I could not use the edges or existing geometry (since there was so little) to carve out details like windows or doors. The lack of being able to bake the model also amplified the issue. I could still texture everything of course, but I had to draw the windows, door, and supports by hand; which in my opinion caused them to appear a bit lacking compared to some of my previous work.

There were 3 separate variants asked from me regarding the house textures. These are also the same variants used in the apartments; Wood, Brick, and Concrete. Besides the colors and materials, I also changed the normal map details across the models, to give them different look facades. These will be some of the most duplicated models in our game, so it was important there was variation between them, while at the same time not looking too "unique", as it those details being duplicated will further bring attention to the fact all of them are really just being copy and pasted everywhere.

I was initially mixed on the wood variant. I was not sure how to color it initially as it really could of been anything on the pastel spectrum, or even a more saturated color. So I left it raw and asked for the producers perspective. They wanted a white/pastel, so that's what I recolored the model as. The roof does not change color, as SF houses do quite universally have dark or grey tiles roofs

It was also brought to my attention that the the brick house is technically red. This is a problem as we wanted red/blue to exclusively be used for emergency response buildings and vehicles. The issue is that brick is rarely painted for residential building, and I could not find any references from San Francisco of a painted brick house still using a suburban style. I decided to heavily mute the colors, so they retain far less red in them. Even with no references of colored bricks, I also made a green variant, basing it off some wood houses I found in the Sunset District.

Only one of these brick variants will be used, of which at this time has not been decided. I also worked on the warehouses. These included two variants, a more militaristic styled ones like those seen in the Presidio and the Piers, as well as a more modern variant seen near the Ferry Building as well as the industrial arears of South City.

The first one is tan adobe like material, that also uses square lighting and grey sealant material for the roof. I heavily utilized normal maps to add in things like the lights, but also create the illusion of corrugated steel used in the garage door.

The more modern variant uses large paneling. As they do on the real world structure, they really don't serve any purpose besides being a aesthetic design. This one uses a thin gravel roof, which is used on many SF buildings that have a large surface arear on their roof.

Lastly, as foreshadowed at the start of this blog post, I textured the Golden Gate Bridge.

The most important part of texturing this was by far was getting the color right. The Golden Gate uses "International Orange", but its a bit more complicated then simply grabbing the hex code of that color and creating a base layer. Because we are utilizing PBR, the color needed to be edited to properly resemble the real world values while in dynamic lighting situations. In terms of detailing, I add some slight levels of soot and peeling, as can be seen on the real bridge. The proportions of the bridge itself of obviously way off as it had to fit within our city limits. This made it very difficult to give it a grand art deco design, as the surface area of the bridge was reduced significantly. I added raised and lower areas in an attempt to replicate it as best I could.

Lastly, I worked on the trees:

There were a lot of compromises we unfortunately had to do with the trees. With how the Unity build was designed there were limited ways we could implement alphas. The "leaf" part of the tree is simply two intersecting planes. In order to have the non-leaf part of these planes to be fully invisible, it also caused the trunk to always be in front of the leaves, regardless of the perspective. This was a worth while compromise though in order to get significantly more detail on the foliage while also retaining a combined tri count of just 4.

The palm tree, due to the nature of its design, was far less affected by the issue stated above, and looks pretty normal when view from angle besides a true top down (as the intersecting planes cant be seen from that angle). 

To conclude, despite doing less work then usual, I was still happy with the amount I was able to complete. Given the models, I was happy with the quality of textures I was able to produce. A lot the time this sprint was actually spent with the trees. Figuring out how to would with Alpha/Opacity was a big hurdle. Its easy to make things look invisible in painter, but for those values to transfer over to a specific version of Unity required quite a lot of testing; as different programs do not register transparency the same ways as others do. Again, super happy with the work I got done, but due to finals coming up, it is highly likely that this amount of work will be my new normal. We have actually completed every single model in the game, so the other 3 modelers are now also working on texturing.