Big Game Project: Week Five

Apologies for the very late submission! Things have been coming to a head with work and I frankly forgot about posting this report. Without further delay I will continue on with my painfully brief report of one of the project’s last weeks.

This week has been a lot about trial and error regarding the Unity engine when implementing terrain into the game. My inexperience showed as I believed it was a simple matter of creating terrain by modelling through 3DS Max and exporting it to Unity. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Constructing the terrain was an easy endeavour in itself, though I had to think of ways to conceal the darkness of the skybox. For this the central landscape proved insufficient. To alleviate this a second landscape was created as a backdrop to the other and at a much larger scale. Following the Lead Designer’s instructions I used a refined heightmap in order to produce the sprawling mountain ranges with the added silhouette of a city in the far distance. However in my haste to implement this I had not properly gone through the standard terrain pipeline within the Unity engine. I had merely looked over the texturing process of a terrain object in Unity and believed that the same could be applied to an imported object from 3DS Max, thinking it was just a matter of converting the mesh into a terrain object in the software. As I soon realised the only way to make use of Unity’s tools was if you had created a terrain object from scratch within the Unity engine itself. While the mesh itself could still be implemented and used, I could not make use of all the texturing tools I believed I would have access to.

The experience serves as a useful reminder on the importance of knowing before doing. In my case several hours of work went to waste simply because I had not acquired a complete understanding of the production pipeline when working on Unity which is an engine I knew I was lacking in experience with and still did not do enough research on the subject matter before proceeding with development. Had I simply watched the walkthroughs and not hastily run ahead I would have known how to proceed and prevent this error. Instead my efforts had to be focused on re-doing and correcting mistakes rather than continuing with my schedueled work.

Until next time!

Björn Erik Berndtsson. Graphics and Game Design.