Game Production - Group Project #4

 To begin creating my unique assets, I sculpted out the meshes in ZBrush so that I would have decent high poly meshes for baking. The sculpting process was a combination of using the ZModeller tool to create the hard surface details before going in with tools like the clay brush to add small details and imperfections. I knew that some models like the boiler were entirely unique and would only be placed once in the scene so I could be more free with the details I sculpted into it but for other assets like the locker or bench, I had to keep the added details to a minimum since they would be duplicated a lot throughout the scene. They would start to look very off if all the scratches and dents were in the same place in every model.

For added variation I created an additional cloth mesh that I would keep separate from the locker so that I could duplicate that sparingly to add to some lockers in the final scene. I felt that would create for a more interesting look overall than just having all lockers be plain faced. I considered making an additional locker mesh that look more broken and beaten up but I had to keep the timeframe I had for this project in mind and decided not to do it as it’d be over complicating things and would eat up too much time. Having just the cloth would be good enough. 

With these meshes I exported them out of ZBrush to retopologize and unwrap them in order to take them into Substance for baking and texturing. With the tri count though, I had to consider how much topology each mesh got considering they had to fill the room and keep the level running at 60 fps but also that the player would be able to walk right up to the vast majority of them.

 
Their tri counts weren’t enormous but I left them at a considerable amount (for example, the locker is around 2k tris) since they’d need to uphold a certain amount of detail since the player will be able to view them up close and I don’t want them to be obviously low poly. If this environment were just for photo rendering only I maybe could get away with things further away from the camera being lower poly but as most assets are in player eyeshot, I felt this kind of tri count was justified.