Water Features and Casas

Getting the river to show up as one poly was kind of a pain because it was not possible to edit the mesh in Unity and it wasn't possible to get a perfect mesh export from Unity into Maya. Thus, there was quite a bit of back and forth. We tried using multiple simple shapes with the same shaders but that proved to be something Unity3d did NOT like.

We begun tuning things for export and are still having a few FPS (frames per second) issues on the highest resolution settings but am always happy that you can pick the quality that best suits your machine.

For sanity's sake we have determined that just building 1 block and fleshing out the river and ditches is probably where we'll stop development. In terms of building and texturing new models we're pretty much at the stop point.

What we're needing at this point is to finish scripting out a few GUI buttons that manipulate camera views so this may be used as a show and tell piece.

It would be nice to leverage the depth of Unity3d's scripting engine to polish this up into an Immersive Education tool. At a later date this might get run up to production.

In the meantime. here are a few more snapshots:

Tent city. These assets are the same ones used in the Second Life build. The mesh was originally modeled in Maya and the texture in Photoshop. The publishing process was a bit different. Second Life required a sculpt map or "sculptie" and Unity3d wanted the NURBS 3d object to be converted into a true mesh and saved out to FXB. It was nice to be able to reuse assets this way. There is a Mesh BETA viewer for Second Life (SL). If it comes out of BETA and is reliable we may end up being able to use even more Unity3d only assets in SL!

Admittedly, this last building is less than complete but we chose to start development on the canals.

I think we're particularly proud of the detail on this house. Robyn did a fantastic job with all the possible angles and the textures we could pull for skinning.

This is the dam. It was a little challenging to make sure this was built 100% accurate. This may still require a bit of work.

The actual Mt. El Cerrito. It's a low poly model but seems fairly accurate in terms of the textures from the face. A more extensive model could be built but in any case that more polygons and photoshop time is to be invested it should be only on high value teaching items. In the event that this ends up being such an item we'll revisit it for sure.

We developed the long lots a bit more with texturing, irrigation ditches and trees. The Unity3d tree editor is a really valuable tool.

Zoomed out views to show the extend of what we modeled for the river mesh.