There is always a lot of effort placed in making the artifacts in games to be of high quality. In our attempts to keep the game realistic as well as high quality, the artists have been hard at work at modelling and animating the animals. Below are some photos to give an idea of what they’ve been up to.
Here is the evolution of the wolf as it goes through the steps
And here is the final models for each of the animals, notice the to scale lemming on the right hand side 😉
Another tough job is to make sure that the animals look like they’re moving in the correct way. This means that the models need to be rigged and animated, and exported into unity. We have had our fair share of problems exporting these rigs into unity, as much of the data is lost in the exporting and importing process. We feel like we do have a handle on that now, and we are grateful, needing many of those for the up and coming playtest.
These are two rigs which, when exported, did not work in unity
These are 3 rigs that have been recently made, and are currently being animated
Over time, we have also begun to texture our models. Involved in texturing is actually putting the animals in Mudbox, sculpting them, and extracting a normal map to save on polygon count for optimization. This allows for lower numbers of polygons on the models, but still allows for a very realistic looking texture on the animals.
Here are many of the final models and their texturing used in game
Besides just needing to create the models and textures, we obviously needed to create the rigs and animate those animals too. Below is a picture of the rigs we used to animate the animals in the game.
Here you can see all the animals with their rigs, the tiny one in the center is a lemming!
Adding the animals was one thing, but we needed to add to the environment. We had changed the map size twice. Once to a larger map with much more segmentation, and once again to a small map but this time keeping the segmentation, which created “more space” in the game. This is the final game map we used in the game.
Included in making the new map, a new texture was made by Eric that went onto the terrain. It made a huge difference to the look of our world. Adding to the look was also the addition of the day night cycle. Below you can see the two taking effect in a screen shot of our game.
