Day 125 : Well that was doozy...

Well you've been seeing all the props I was making for the apartment, but I never posted the apartment scene here. It's actually been awhile since I've worked on this as the last time I did any major art assets for it was in July. August was eaten by another project and then a failure of motivation and effort on my part. I meant to post these screens right after making that last post, but my family dragged me out for a vacation for the week.

The kitchen, empty, uninteresting, and setting the standard for what's to come.

The kitchen, got a ton of empty space to fill in and make interesting. Also there is something wrong going on with those cabinet doors.

Dining room

The dining room, and again a common reoccurring theme is that the rooms will look sterile and empty. I have to work on some minor props to litter the scene and really make the apartment feel lived in.

Living space and floating main character

The main living area along with the main character, which was not done by me. It is probably the most flushed out room so far, but there are pathing issues to work out and some extra props wouldn't hurt. I'm also not that satisfied with the ceiling, as those indentations have some odd lighting artifacts.

The foyer, the way out of this mess.

The foyer, it could do with some actual footwear / a coat hanger / welcome mats and rugs / a side table to help make it seem less lifeless. I also could do a different style door to indicate that it is going out of the apartment.

Living space view 2

Here is the living room again, with a closeup of the potted plant. I was pretty proud of myself when I made that, but now I'm not so sure it's any good. Either way I'll get lots of practice doing plants and vegetation soon - one of the next environments is an outdoor park.

The balcony, what are the neighbors up to?

The view from the balcony. I need to get some deck chairs and figure out something for the sliding doors when the avatar walks in and out of the room. I also need to get a skybox together, as the big grey emptiness has to go. The game also has a time of day system, it's not real time, but still that means that I'll have to figure something out for controlling the skybox and the ambient and direct sunlight.

A box in the sky

Overview of the balcony. I've got other apartments duplicated to modular build the apartment facade with the insides taken out for performance. The camera should never really focus on them so thankfully I don't think I'll need any new props to help differentiate them, but they are there so any oddities with camera movement don't show awkward clipping.

The view to sea, with nothing to see.

A first person view out to sea. Yeah we really need a skybox here.

Bedroom

Yeah I'm no interior designer. The wallpaper is pretty ugly and the tiling can be noticeable. Also missing curtains or blinds or anything to drown out sunlight.  Maybe some small props like a digital clock and a storage box at the base of the bed would help. Getting a digital clock to mirror the in game time would also be great, just that my experience with 3D text in Unity hasn't been the best. (It doesn't backface clip and renders on top of geometry so you'll always see it from the wrong angles.)

Bedroom view 2

The other side of the room, looking into the main washroom.  An issue that will likely be raised in the future is when the characters go to sleep. We have the animations for it, but I'll need to either replace or deform the bed sheets to fit around the sleeping characters if we show them.

The main washroom

The mirrors are another annoyance, at first I found a script that generated real time reflections so that they functioned as actual mirrors, but it was rather buggy since I had two mirrors in the scene for the two washrooms. They also took 50% of the computing power when running the game and lagged it down significantly. Needless to say I cut those and replaced them with a simple cubemap reflective shader for now. I'd like to come up with a better solution, but there are other issues to work at first.

The secondary washroom

Broadway's paintover critique

The mirror manages to perform worse. Counter also looks terrible with the nasty seams. A helpful chap named Broadway over on polycount helped me out with a paintover critique of the room. Well the difference in current state and what it could be is obvious. Still a ton of work to do, and then still there are two more unique environments to do. Hopefully I will be able to reuse a bunch of assets.

The study

The book cabinets where meant to be much more unique and interesting with different colours and text to help build a diverse library. Each stack is meant to be rearranged and have singular books clip in to help build z-axis diversity. But I rushed it and never went back to give it the proper attention I had planned for. Again the scene looks pretty barren.

The iPear, master tool and time waster

Part of the game will have the player sitting down at the desk to answer questions and buy things. The design calls for the camera to shift into first person view while doing so. Here's the view as it is now. ... Well I tried to do low resolution and low poly props, but it's extremely obvious, blurry, and awful here in particular. Iterative design time it is then, as right now these are a must fix.

The hall to the study and washroom

A picture, a decorative table with a flower pot? Anyways this probably needs something, but I'm no interior designer.

Apartment Overview

And that is it for the tour right now. Still a ton of renovations and prop building/fixing/editing to do. Back in July I'd liked to have called it done, but as you can see it's not living up to the potential of what it could be.

Anyways this'll conclude this return to blog posting, hopefully I'll get daily updates going again. I'd like to fix up the apartment starting now, but at the moment there are programming issues to get to first.