Big Game Project – Week 5

The logo has been (more or less) completed! There’s still some polish to be done – the bolt in the D needs some more definition, and there’s supposed to be some blue lightning bolts surrounding the text. Also that “chipped paint” effect needs to be better. But so far it’s looking pretty good!
I decided to use the robot’s color scheme because consistency is good! The reason I picked them for the robot is that red is a classic “racing color”, and the teal color is the exact complement to it.

The design is very inspired by Ratchet & Clank’s logo:

The character texture is pretty much finished as well! It came out really good in my opinion, a lot better than I expected!

I started by rendering an AO pass of the character. For those of you wondering, AO stands for ambient occlusion, which is a term used to describe the diffuse shadows that occur from the ambient light in the environment. I used 3ds Max to illuminate the model with a diffuse light from all angles, and baked the resulting shadows into a texture. This is then used in the diffuse texture to give it a way more realistic look.

Because the arms and hands need to move a lot, I had to bake all the parts separately. This is to prevent the different parts from casting strong shadows on each other that will be visible when the character bends his arm.
I set the blue parts of the exhausts, the “boostometer” and the eyes as separate objects when I exported the character to put it in Unity. This is so that we can apply a self-illuminating shader to those parts, which means they’ll glow blue in-game.

For the “chipped paint” look, I took the Pen tool in Photoshop and used that to create some custom shapes. Other than being very versatile and easy to change, this method allowed me to fake ambient occlusion by applying a light inner shadow as a Layer Effect on the custom shape layer. This way, the shadow instantly appeared as I created new shapes. For the brown dirt, I just used a soft standard brush and lightly dabbed some color in here and there.

I’ve been working some more on the skybox textures, but they’re nowhere near done yet. As you can see, we have two levels – one during sunset and one during night. I’m not happy with the sunset one at all. The reddish terrain makes it look like the game is set in a green oasis in the middle of Hell! It will definitely need some iteration.

I started on some more generic props. We do have a lot of props in the game, but the world is really lacking in “story” right now. The point is that it’s a post-apocalyptic world, so I’m making some junk to help convey that (That big blob is a junk pile). I’m also going to make some old rusty cars.
The world is also supposed to be really overgrown (like in The Last of Us) so I’ll be making some props for that as well. We need more “wild” plants, like ivy and tall grass, that we can put all over the place, and on top of other props.

Next week will be dedicated to improving the world.