New this week

Art jail is rough. I’ve created all the standard geometry for 1 of the 1×1 tiles and replaced all the room prefabs with the correct walls. I discovered a glaring issue with the prefab lighter that had to be remedied. I’m currently in the process of creating trinkets and random props to adorn the tiles with.

Changes to prefab lighting

A problem with the prefab lighter was that it caused issues with prefab variants. In its original state baking the lighting would apply the prefab variants to the original prefab. This would make it completely unusable as overriding the template would break everything. Due to me making an editor script that would change and save prefab variants I have knowledge on how strange the prefab utilities are. I currently have a jerry-rigged solution where I’ve commented out all the code to save prefabs. This changes the baking process to baking the lighting then manually applying the changes. In normal circumstances this wouldn’t be great but since baking light takes a while anyway it shouldn’t matter all too much. However, if this gets tedious, I will probably try to implement the same prefab saver as I’ve made before.

Tile Art

During the production of the first enemy, I talked about changing my blender to unity pipeline by using as much of blender’s material system as possible. This method is actually less efficient when it comes to simple small props. The original pipeline of making the materials in unity is faster and easier. I’ll probably keep using the blender material system when it comes to animated or complex models but for trinkets and junk it won’t be necessary.

Below is my work in progress first tile, called TS1_1x1_1. It needs more props and then light baking, but I want to nail the theming before rushing forward.

I plan on adding more props to shelves and railings to the raised areas. Looking at it now, I may re-do the wall material. I really like the carvings on the arches so I may use a similar style to mark the stones in the walls.

The statue in the middle has no original materials on it. I probably will properly unwrap and material that statue but it’s low on the priorities right now.

I will be following some of the old design lessons from Team Fortress 2. Namely, the environment should be a lower saturation from the interactable objects. This allows players quick identification and lowered eye strain.

What’s next?

More art jail. If I think up an item I’ll add it but other than that its just more art jail.