Props, everywhere props!

Last week I did a lot of props, aka models and alpha planes to make the map more visually pleasing. First of I did the pine cone huts for the forest creeps. Unfortunately I did the first version more complicated than needed and with an edge-flow that frankly was horrible. Not only that but when doing the high poly model I went a little crazy pulling out geometry where there was none on the low poly. So, the high poly texture on the low poly model looked extremely weird and when I added the brown colour and the ambient occlusion it looked like something that comes out of a cow… like this!

So I had to redo it. I looked at a real pine cone this time and realized it has a more rounded shape than what I first did and that I didn’t need to complicate it as much. Instead of doing a lot of work on the high poly I just cropped a real pine cone to the material in Photoshop.  It looked so muck better but of course there is much that can be done to it but I don’t have the time right now. This was the end result along with a fireplace, tree stump and a dried up log that I also made last week.

When all the props where done I had the job to place them on the map. We don’t have all that many (about 15) props so the challenge was to make all the different places look “unique”. Rescaling and rotating is the key. The only thing left to do to the map on my part is placing the alpha flower planes. Here are the crystals I made for “Snappys” little corner of the world. We are going to add pointlights to the to make them glow in Unity.