The Environment
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This week I continued with the level and the environment. I started the first two days of the week by carefully placing and filling the map with the content that I already had. During this stage I thought a lot about how I should plan the map and constantly tested what worked and what did not work by play testing and running around the map after almost everything I did. The problem was that due to most of the mechanics not being done yet it was hard to try everything. One of the things I tried doing was to create some areas with a large amount of lush and flora while some contained much less. To create these natural roads and areas that you can spot other player through, while still being able to hide in other areas. I also added roads and created a structure in unity for the environment. After I had done this I started working on the lightning of the map, trying out the lightning editor in Unity. I tried everything from changing the color of the directional light to swapping the sky box lightning as well as the ambient light. After itterating this for a couple of hours I decided that to get the blue, alien look that we aimed for the best solution would be to create a color gradient for the ambient light, with some blue and purple in it. Then lower the intensity of the directional light and then finally adding a color gradient to the player camera. This gradient took a long time to create and we will probably change it a lot i the future again. Right now it does however have an increased amount of blue and green and less red.
The top one is with the color correction and the lower one is with only the lightning. As you can see the lower one does not really give this alien feeling that we were looking for and it does look somewhat grey and boring.
Another thing you can spot in these pictures is that I started working on a crafting station for the level. The model itself is very simple and did not take long to create. What took time however was to discuss with the other artist and deciding on a style we wanted our props in the map to be. We agreed that this style would fit the environment and still stick out so you clearly see that it is not some natural. The model will be updated in the future with some more detail and so will the uv map be, as it right now it does not work that well. One thing about this that looks really cool is however the beam coming out of it. This beam is created using particle effects in unity. I created this beam and the ground fog you can see on the ground this week, the beam does right now simply use a default texture and consists of fast moving particles that scales down before the vanish in the sky.  |
