Environment Creation Part 3

By Meg Sugden
Taking it into Unity
The last stage of creating the environment was taking it into Unity. This was the most important stage of it as I wanted to make it look incredible and just like the initial concept art, which I do believe I have done, if not exceeded. I am very pleased with the overall looked and I wanted to add in same details that will make the world come more alive. Throughout the entire creation of the environment I always kept in mind that this environment is part of a bigger world as well and I wanted to bring in these smaller details just to give the environment a lived in feeling.

I started by taking in the environment from Maya and the first thing I did was add in the water and then our own texture for the environment, which Stuart created in Photoshop. Throughout the environment as we wanted to add in these smaller details we added in a hammock into the larger tree, which is where the platypus and his girlfriend, who is a sugar glider, would sleep. Then there is all of the food detail on the floor which we have tried to throw everywhere to give that illusion that there has been a break in without having to say. I really tried to bring in an element of environmental storytelling into this as we don't have anything to say that the village has been robbed.

I then had to go threw the entire environment and check that everything was sitting on the floor as when creating it in Maya it was difficult to judge the floor level on occasion, but this didn't take too long and I was able to move around the environment quickly and fix any issues.

I then wanted to add in more trees as it is meant to be a forest in the environment so I wanted to ensure that I conveyed this is in environment the best I could. As I didn't want to add in any more geometry I just used billboards and found tat this worked really well to fill in the spaces at the back so that when we get close to the forest in the film, it appears to be huge and stretches on for miles.

Another really nice small detail that we wanted to add in was this pirate ship. Callum made this in his first year for a character that would appear in the same universe so I really wanted this to be added in to once again make the world come alive. I found that having little details like this in the environment was a really nice touch and it created a more lived in world that could actually exist. We wanted the pirate ship to be a ship wreck from another land and this is where the platypus and his family would gather their supplies from which is why the crates that they have in their village are so big as they have come from this pirate ship originally owned by a Walrus, a much larger character in which barrels would be the correct size.