Til Infinity Meets Eternity

Hi, been a bit, it’s me, the 3d artist, Antonio… Daniel has been low-key carrying this whole indie db operation for a while now, but finally, it’s time for my long awaited return!

So what had me occupied all this time?

Burnout…

O-okay, but what have you been working on?

Nothing… Is what I would say if I hadn’t had a massive burst of productivity for the past week!

Today’s topic:

Revamping the whole scene with asset STANDARDIZATION WOOOOOOO!

Now to give a little bit of context to our readers. I am actually quite new to producing whole sceneries for unity. I mostly focused on learning how to use 3d software and then shipped the final result to a colleague who would implement the asset in the scene. For this specific project, I had to get out of my shell for a bit and actually manage my own assets for once.

And the results were awful:

Corners with different scales, couldn’t even use the snapping grid properly, assets with mismatching brick sizes, pivots 60 meters away from the actual asset. Miss-managed prefabs, the whole 9 yards. All of which, in hindsight, probably helped to manifest my burnout as the tiny little (or not so little) imperfections started weighing on me harder than my deadlines

So while I was procrastinating playing my current new obsession Omega Strikers (do try it out, it’s the most fun I had in a game since Outer Wilds), our project discord gets a ping from an external colleague:

“Hey, your project is in a bit of a mess right now, can I check it out and give you feedback”

To which we responded, “Go ahead knock yourself out”.

After a few passing remarks of feedback (all well warranted) at 3 A.M. a large “.txt” file drops on our Discord describing a lot of issues with our project. Which somehow jump-started my motivation to keep working on the project.

So after all of this, what did I have to do?

Remake the whole scene with re-imported assets

Which was way scarier than it sounded, here’s the process:

1. Make a new scene.
2. Add the standard Unity plane to said scene.
3. Export that plane as a .FBX file and import it to your 3d software of choice.
4. Open Maya.
5. Import Walls, Floors, and the Unity Plane.
6. Scale imported assets to match Unity Plane.
7. Realize that it’s not quite right, mess around with the scaling some.
8. What? No matter what nice simple number you use it just doesn’t match it right.
9. This is dumb why can’t it be an easy number that can be divided by 10?
10. 78 is not quite right. I’ll try a .5 maybe.
11. 79.18, 79.18, 79.18, 79.18, 79.18, 79.18, 79.18, 79.18, 79.18, 79.18, 79.18, 79.18,

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So that was a fun rabbit hole, as it turns out Maya’s scale (unless you mess around with the default settings) doesn’t have a 1:1 scale with Unity, the closest number I got to was 78.19 for our specific project. (Whisper: if you look really closely at the image you’ll be able to tell that it still isn’t right)

Also as a PSA the walls I modeled used walls from a previous project as a reference so 78.19 isn’t a good scale factor for projects other than ours.

After that, it was a matter of rebuilding the whole dungeon which ended up being surprisingly fun as I was very unhappy with the state of our previous scene. Here are the Results:

The new initial bridge room.

The New generator area (the water goes down as the game progresses)

A new corridor.

Another new corridor 🙂

A new room preceding the new “Safe Room” area.

The Start of the new “Safe Room” area.

New Layout

Old layout

Here´s the new assets that yours truly has made in the past 4 days or so.

So that’s how our project is currently going, in the following weeks we might have some vfx to show, maybe if Daniel’s willing we might even drop a coding article or two.

‘Til then I was your local 79.18 fanatic, thank you for reading,

Antonio Sotto-Mayor and the T.I.M.E. team.

Source: Indie DB