Busy busy busy today. I made the decision to change the way I was building the environment. It initially made sense to build a large model within Shade 3D and then import the whole thing in to Unity. However I had still created things in a modular fashion in Shade 3D; with wall segments being placed together to make longer walls. The downside of this was that Unity seemed to want to create new materials for each and every wall segment in the map which made life difficult if I wanted to make a change to all wall pieces. So, I exported my segments from Shade 3d and have now rebuilt the first environment in Unity using these elements that slot together nicely – and with just one material.
Next up I took another look at the cell doors and felt that they needed more character. So, I’ve added a sliding peephole in the door so that the asylum staff would be able to check on a patient without having to open the door. The slide covers were left as separate parts of the door so that a little bit of variety could be added to each door by setting the slide panels to different places.
After this I was really keen to see about giving the player a torch (flashlight). This actually proved to be a lot easier than I thought it would be, the hardest part was setting the strength and range of the spotlight to ensure it looked and felt correct. I also added a ‘cookie’ to the light. A cookie is basically a greyscale texture that shines through the light source and produces the illusion of the dirty lens at the projection end, for example a torch usually has a weak spot in the middle of the light. I haven’t as yet added in any way to turn the torch on or off and it’s also not going to be something that the player has from the start.
Finally for today I took the room and wall textures back to ShaderMap Pro and made improvements to the normal maps and also introduced a few heightmaps to improve the depth of walls.
As promised I will be posting a new screenshot, possibly 2 tomorrow. Stay tuned.
