AshtonJSmith

Prototyping Unity terrain

We wanted the map design for BroBots to be completely different to how we were first creating them, in fact, the entire game feels like a completely new and different experience. To start, I wanted to make more of an open-world design type of map. This was due to loads of feedback we had from our previous prototypes where the map design was tight and cluttered and messed too much with the camera making it unenjoyable.

So, I started researching Unity terrain and watching Youtube videos on how to use this.

Testing out the colliders capabilities

Sadly, the BroBot colliders don't do too well with colliders on platforms that aren't flat, and because of that the character was clipping more than we would've liked while prototyping different map designs.

Prototyping grassy biomes

Before giving up, I tried some more tests, adding grass to the terrain to get an idea of what it could potentially look like if I was to further develop this type of level. However, due to the limited time we have left, I sadly had to scrap the concept of having an open terrain BroBots level, as this is something that will take me months to perfect, thus resulting in going for a more basic map design approach.

Floating Platforms Level Design

Building your Own Staircase in Zone One!

Zone Three, Shooting Targets!

Custom BroBot Paint Jobs!

With all the BroBot model complete, and the animations in and ready to go, I now was required to model different intractable's that would be present within the BroBot levels. For all of these assets I followed the correct game asset workflow, 3D modelling inside of Blender, and then took the high res and low res models into Substance Painter for texturing.

Magnetic Crate in Blender

The first asset I decided to create was the magnetic cube which the BroBots are able to pick up with their magnet mechanic and also shoot away. Within the experience, they can be used to build staircases, shoot targets or even in the future be used to knock other players off the map.

Pressure Pad Model in Blender

After the magnetic crate, came the pressure pad. This pressure pad causes a magnetic crate to spawn once the player has jumped and activated the pad. The pressure pad was also animated to have different animations for when the player would activate and de-activate the pads.

Pressure Pad Model in Substance Painter

Target Model in Blender

After the pressure pad, came another style of button, the target. These targets are located on the walls of the map, and are activated by a crate hitting the target. Like the pressure pad, the target has been animated in order to be pressed in and out.

Target Model in Substance Painter

Jump Pad Model in Blender

I also modelled and textured a new jump pad model, the jump pad model was animated like the other two models, however because of time these animations were never able to be implemented.

Jump Pad Model in Substance Painter

Button and Crate Working Together

Creating the BroBot Armature

It's required to create an armature for the BroBot before I'm able to animate him so that he can be imported into Unity and replace the old BroBot models.

This process involved me creating the bones within Blender, and lining them up perfectly snapping each bone joint into the perfect place to give the BroBot a mechanical look and feel for his animations.

Testing out the Mantle Animation

Render Test of the BroBot Rig

Once his the BroBot rig was complete, my next step was to create all of the required animations and then begin importing them into Unity.

Idle and Run Animations

Jump and Dash Animations

Magnet Gloves and Climbing Animations

Flip and Waving Emote Animations

Retopologising/Baking normal maps

For the BroBot models to have the greatest performance possible, they need to be low-poly with the correct topology. This is because extra polys on a 3D model are more demanding hardware, lowering the average frames per second (FPS). Thus I need to perform successful and clean retopology, this is the process of converting high-resolution models into a lower resolution.

The trick that all modern games use to get more detail out of less geometry is normal mapping. A normal map is a special kind of image texture that tells the game engine to bounce light off at a different angle than the surface that is actually there. We’re tricking light into rendering the illusion of depth. It might seem like magic, but normal mapping does have certain limitations that we need to be aware of in order to get the best possible result (Lampel, 2017).

After researching the correct game asset workflow, I also had an online meeting with a professional working in the game industry who taught me about the importance of using high res models and baking their normals onto low poly models.

Steps to follow:

1. Add extreme detail to BroBot model for high-res model

2. Retopoligse into a low poly model

3. Load low poly model into Substance Painter

4. Bake high-res model normals onto low-res

5. Paint textures onto low poly model using high-res normals

Chest/Thruster/Head Process

Head/Arms/Ear Process

Finishing the Body, Hands and Legs

This process ended up taking me weeks to get right, it was a giant learning curve but eventually, I managed to do it.

PHOTO BEFORE AND AFTER TOPOLOGY

The high res BroBot model consists of 681,000 faces, this is way too many polys for a game engine to be able to handle. Now, the BroBot model comes in at 4,000 polys, which is slightly higher than I was aiming for, but it was the lowest I could take it to keep a good amount of detail.

Texture Maps, Uvs and Retopologised BroBot

This project is a collaboration between:

Ashton Smith

Matt Hopwood

Nathan Gibson

Here is my list of all the process blogs:

1. BroBots Redesign

2. BroBot Model Progress

3. Preparing the BroBot for Game Engines

4. Rigging and Animating

5. Creating the Assets

6. Level Creation

Download BroBots and play here:

Play Hazardous Cargo on Itch.io:

Liminal Hotel

Liminal Rooms

Liminal Wooden House

Liminal Asylum

Liminal Subway

Somewhere, Nowhere - Playthrough

Somewhere, Nowhere Download Page

Creating a Tile-able Carpet Texture

After creating the First-Person assets, the next step was to start producing the modular assets to texture them and create different liminal spaces.

Prototyping the Modular Floor Inside Unity

Modular Map Pieces Textured

Developing the Modular Assets with Textures

Creating Pillars for Large/Medium Rooms

All Modular Pillars, Pipes, and Skirting Complete

Creating White Wooden Doors

Different Styled Liminal Space Rooms and Textures

A concept we came up with, was the idea of a lost soul wondering throughout the liminal spaces that the player is currently trapped in. The idea is that this lost soul was once in the same situation as the player but was never able to escape and leave the state of transition, thus becoming a lost soul who would hunt the player down.

Sculpting a Base Mesh for the Lost Soul

I began creating the Lost Soul in Blender by taking basic shapes of a human base mesh, and then manipulating them and forming them to have longer limbs in all areas, and have a much skinnier physic. I used reference images to help guide my design decisions.

Finishing the Lost Soul high res model

I sculpted the Lost Soul to have an extremely bony and skinny body, to appear as if he's been trapper for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years having nothing to feast on, with his body deteriorating.

Retopologised low res model

To texture and animate the Lost Soul in order to import him into the Unity project successfully, I was required to retopologise him, and get his poly count as low as I could, while still maintaining his most important details for a clean bake within Substance Painter.

Texturing in Substance Painter

Adding a Rig

After texturing him, I was onto rigging him, so I could animate the different movements he would perform within Somewhere, Nowhere. I started off with matching bones to his body as perfectly as I could.

Generating a Character Controller out of the Rig

Once I had matched the bones to his body, I generated the rig to access all the character controllers to help the animating process.

Animations

I made a bunch of different animations for the Lost Soul, lots of transitions from one animation to another, but the most important animations are the ones shown below, idle (when he's staring at the player), walking (when he's slowly approaching the player) and running (when he's either running towards the player to consume them or running away from the light of the lantern).

Idle:

Walking:

Running:

Lost Soul Render

With the lantern complete, it was time for the second part of the FPS. Which was preparing the arms, texturing them to look like real human skin.

Modifying the Arm Base Mesh

Rather than modelling these arms from scratch, I took a slight shortcut and grabbed these arms from a MakeHuman character model, but then imported and modified them within Blender to get them perfect for our character controller.

Texturing the Arm

I took the arm into Substance Painter, and followed the usual workflow to try and create realistic looking skin.

Rigging the Arm and Lantern for Animations

After texturing, came rigging the arm and lantern, so that I could import them together into Unity, and begin adding animations that would play while walking, running or standing still. Without these animations, Somewhere, Nowhere would feel bland and lifeless.

Testing the Arm and Lantern Within Unity

Creating the Player Animations

Idle Animation:

Walking Animation:

Running Animation:

Adding the Animations

With all the animations done (still with some future improvements needed) I imported them all into Unity, and with Nates character controller he got the animations working seamlessly together with the player.

Final Lantern In-game Screenshot

This screenshot is from the future where I have completed my map design for one of the liminal spaces in Somewhere, Nowhere.

Lockdown Complications

Originally for Somewhere, Nowhere we were going to have users experience it with a VR headset, but because of lockdown, we wouldn't have been able to test as much as we would've liked, if not at all. So, we decided to scrap the VR headset and instead create a first-person shooter-style instead, except without the guns.

Modelling the Lantern within Blender

The first step for me was to model a lantern that the player would use as a light to guide themselves around the different liminal spaces. I used Blender, as I do with all of my 3D models. Looking at reference photos, I created the shape and aesthetic I felt best suited Somewhere, Nowheres vibe.

Low and high res model for baking

Luckily, I now know the official game asset creation workflow and have been able to use this workflow to create much more official game assets. After creating the lantern as a high poly model, I retopologised it to prepare the high res models to detail to be baked onto the low res model.

UV Unwrapping the model

The texturing process within Substance Painter requires the models UVs to be efficiently unwrapped, to get the most detail possible out of the textures.

Prototyping Blender to Substance Painter

Baking the high res maps to the low res model is never successful the first time round, or for me, twentieth time round. So I did plenty of prototyping doing the lantern piece by piece until I could get the maps baking perfectly.

Creating different materials in Substance Painter

Final Lantern Render

After gaining user feedback I have been using that to continue the development of the BroBot models, constantly gaining advice as I go, talking to friends and family to get their opinions as I've been unable to hold more user surveys in person. This process has taken more weeks than I expected, as I've been learning plenty along the way.

Creating the Arms and Hands

Creating the Legs

Final BroBot Model Design

Colour Customisation

Something else I've messed around with is the concept of individuals being able to customize their BroBots as they're playing, being able to choose whatever colours they'd like.

The Future Plans

Matt, Nate, and I have decided to continue working on BroBots for semester 2 this year. However, we felt that with the new skills we've acquired, we would completely change how the game currently is. So for me, the first half of this semester has been to focus on remastering the BroBot character model.

We wanted our new character model to be loved by as many people as possible, resulting in increased overall enjoyment while playing BroBots. This meant rather than just producing models based on my own opinions, I would make as many different concepts as possible, then show these to peers to gain user feedback, ensuring we would end with the perfect model. I made sure to get as large of a data set as possible, so we got 30 different users as feedback for each different question. Every week I had new concepts to get votes and opinions on.

Eye Concept Comparisons

To begin with, I prototyped two different eye concepts, one being a screen face with plenty of personalities, and the other simple circular eyes that are able to blink. Although the screen face adds about 2x more workload, I knew it had the potential to be a great feature for the characters.

This first test was very obvious which head style would go-ahead to become the new BroBot style, with 27 of our respondents voting for the screen face and only 3 votes for the circle eyes.

Screen Eyes: 27

Circle Eyes: 3

Head Comparisons

Next to gain feedback on were different head styles. All three heads were somewhat similar but we wanted some guidance on which kind people preferred. Resulting in head 3 having 23 individuals vote for that style as their personal favorite. Another easy round of feedback.

Head 1: 2

Head 2: 5

Head 3: 23

Body Proportion Comparisons

After the heads, came the body proportions. I quickly used basic shapes to prototype potential shapes and sizes of different BroBot bodies, to see which kind people would prefer to play as.

Proportion 1 (Big): 1

Proportion 2 (Small): 2

Proportion 3 (Small body, Big hands): 4

Proportion 4 (Medium): 6

Proportion 5 (Small Body, Big hands + Feet) - 18

Body Comparisons

The last survey I was able to hold before lockdown was different styled body types for the BroBots. This was the very first survey we held where the feedback was relatively close in results, making it harder to make a decision, which is why for the final BroBot design I used a blend of body 1 & 2 as they had the highest amount of votes.

Body 1: 13

Body 2: 5

Body 3: 13

Testing With a Quick Rig

Testing out hand rigs/styles

Prototyping the temporary rig

Somewhere, Nowhere. This is the name we have decided best fits our project, as that's exactly what we're hoping our users to experience, being somewhere, while they're nowhere, living in a liminal space. Confusing? Yes. Hard to achieve? Yes, but this is what we will be aiming towards for the future of this project.

Prototyping

To get an idea of whether or not our concept will work and the best way to go about it, Matt, Nate, and I put together a prototype for users to test so we could receive some feedback on what we currently have, and how we can improve it to achieve our purpose.

Using Blender, I handled the 3D models for the prototype. Creating 4 different types of rooms that would be generated. Each with different types of doorways, increasing the randomness that users may have to travel upon launching into the experience.

Timelapse of the Process

3D Models in Blender

While I was working on the rooms, Matt handled incorporating all of the audio and finding free textures online for the environment, to add to the atmosphere. Nate was in charge of programming the random room generator within Unity, and making sure it would be able to work off of the 3D rooms that I had created on Blender.

The Unity Project

Play-through

Further Developments

We were originally planning to have our users play through Somewhere, Nowhere on old CTV televisions, possibly within a liminal space. However, after prototyping our current test, and gaining feedback from our peers, we realized that because we want to completely encapsulate our users within the liminal spaces, our best option would be to get them to play through with a Virtual Reality headset, paired with noise-canceling headphones.

During our critical feedback session, we were happy that our peers liked our concept, and thought that what we had so far was promising with loads of potential. It was conflicting as some of the feedback we received was that they loved our original idea of having users be in a liminal space in real life while playing through Somewhere, Nowhere on a CTV television.

To start the semester off, Matt, Nate, and I formed a group for Space, Image, and Sound. We each have our own individuals strengths, and we found that together we make a pretty good team.

To build up inspiration, we began by exploring through different art exhibits. Each gallery was fantastic and extremely inspiring, helping us slowly put together and form our ideas.

Gus Fisher Gallery (Auckland)

Auckland Art Gallery and ST Paul ST Gallery

Sculptureum (Matakana)

Just from walking through these galleries, even though this may not be the intended feeling, we all felt that sensation of liminality. From the old CTV televisions, the galleries themselves, the feeling you get upon entering empty rooms, and the process of walking from gallery to gallery is a state of transition. This ultimately is what it's like to experience liminality which intrigued us, causing us to further explore this topic.

Somewhere, Nowhere

After plenty of discussion on our concept, brainstorming different ideas, and using research to help guide us, we chose to focus our project on Liminal Spaces. Liminality is all about ‘the in-between’, the transition and process of moving towards something new. Liminality is deeply intertwined with spaces, birthing an internet trend of ‘Liminal Spaces’, which are admired for their sense of surreality and alternative aesthetic. Liminal spaces or artworks surrounding the concept are also often associated with the feeling of discomfort, unease, and fear. For something to be described as liminal, it must fit the criteria of being an “intermediate between two states, conditions, or regions; transitional or indeterminate”.

Examples of Liminal Spaces

Sorting through our ideas

Nathan, Matt, Zhe and I grouped together for Virtual Reality, we began by brain storming together in a group to collaborate and come up with potential concepts for what we want our project to be. We then had a voting system to choose are favourite idea and settled on Out Space (which was further developed into Orbital Cleanup Crew).

Beginning to 3D model the Space Ship

Cockpit improvements/Post Processing in Unity

Although post processing is quite demanding on mobile phones, I've used Unitys post processing system to make the scene look much better, with the help of bloom making the screen and buttons glow, and ambient occlusion helping to give extra detail to the shadows between objects. If this makes a great impact on the FPS I can easily remove these effects.

Working On The Outside

Final Spaceship Model

Space ship cockpit

Space Junk

Gameplay Video

Creating The Concept Map Within Blender

UV Unwrapping For Future Materials

Creating Cracks in The Door

Completed Scene Screenshots

Work in Progress:

Death Final: