Developer Journal Series 3 - 3D Scene Setup

Hello people this is Joe Liu again. Picking up from what I left behind last time, this time I'll  share the process of setting up the 3D scene.

This is a screenshot of the scene with only the big props.

Once the ground plan was established, things move into the next phase - modeling, or mesh creating. At first it was the making of big props such as counter, shelf, refrigerator, tables and chairs. Since at this point the art style has been decided, we're going for a simplistic vector style, most big meshes are made with very simple shapes.

They all look stupidly simple at the beginning.

After the big props are all in place, then comes the small assets creation. Chip bags, bottles, paintings, flower pots, and the lists goes on and on. Unlike big props which fill up the whole space, these small props only look good if there are a lot of them. That's been said the process of thinking what the scene lack and making a mesh to fill up a tiny space can be redundant, especially when this process goes on for a hundred times or more depends on how crowded the scene is.

It looks more like a livable place when small assets are added.

 So after all those modeling business finally comes the UVs and textures. Thanks to the art style we chose the texturing part isn't as painful, it's mainly fill in the blank with bucket and add a texture to make it look more detailed.

Compare to the painful UV process texturing is way easier.

The exact same scene, with proper texture and lighting.

At the end when everything get puts together in Unity, with proper lighting they suddenly look 1000 times better than what they look like before. And to this point it pretty much sum up what I want to talk about in terms of scene setup, the next journal series will feature the 3D models of the 2 characters.