Charles - Contributions to Game

As well as working on hatchet man, I was assigned to unwrap and texture many of the assets for Matt's "Plains" level: 

The cave texture worked well except when some parts were shown close to the camera. To remedy this, I broke the UVs at the front off and scaled them up. There is a seam but because it's obscured by rocks, it works, and the foreground is less pixelated where it's seen.

The "cave bin".

The bridge in the cave.

The "cave cap". Had similar problems to the cave texture, only more extreme. A lot was seen up close. The solution we ended up choosing was to break the mesh into two parts and give each of those parts 4096*4096 textures. I stretched and compressed the UVs where necessary - in Unity I saw the left side of the mesh is never seen in game, so quality is really low/compressed there. In other parts, the UVs are larger to capture more detail. There are also trees growing out of the stone, which is a bit weird, but after talking to Matt about it and testing it in Unity, the area is typically to blurred by the camera, or obscured by other assets, for the player to see this.

The "cave lift" was a pain to unwrap until I realised I could just unwrap one of each component and duplicate them several times. Effectively remodelling the whole thing, but so much easier than trying to unwrap it as it was.

Just a plank. Nothing to see here. I had to tone down the saturation because it matched the colour of the ground too much.

The pylons for the cave. Originally all the same colour and tone, but I thought altering the vertical parts would make it stand out too much if we were using the same mesh several times. To make repetition less obvious the tone is the same on the vertical planks, but the horizontal and diagonal parts are different.

Originally part of a separate project, Matt wanted to put this house in somewhere on his level. I'm not sure if he did but I still had to re-name, re-align and prepare everything for an export into Unity.

Just a brick. The last I heard was that it probably wasn't going to be used.

The cliff. At this point in the game, I decided it would be cool if the grass got more lush and generally inviting, the higher the player climbed, seeing as the floating islands that lead the player to it had similar grass. 

The terrain below the cliff. You can see the grass and dirt is different - rougher, eventually meeting solid stone.

Part of the fence. Matt specifically wanted mossy things growing on it, so I overlayed / multiplied with a moss texture in Photoshop. 

Don't be deceived by this render: the "plainsFields" mesh is probably one of the largest in the game. This is the one that required the most back-and-forth testing in Unity. Originally outfitted with a 2048x2048 texture, the final version was split into three separate .fbx files with 4096*4096 textures. Even then, the UVs needed a complete overhaul to use each pixel effectively. The background, for example, is so blurred by the Unity camera, that there is almost no need to worry about seams and pixellation. Extra care was taken to make sure that the paths matched up in Unity before finally giving it to Matt. Following Matt's suggestion and my theme of "things getting more green" as the character progresses, you can see the change in the colour of the grass as the character continues past the river.

Originally I had wanted the "level end" mesh to have some flowers in its textures. I had to scrap the idea because the textures looked terrible with flowers. It would have been nice, but unfortunately the "plains" remain "plain". 

My glorious "mossy rock" texture. 

I think this was originally modelled by Matt, but Josh did a re-model of it, adding gaps and broken planks. Then I unwrapped and textured.

The "wall". It was fun trying to match the front of it up with the side and top, but it looks okay in game, I guess.

The second "wooden fence", textured. 

Lastly, Matt said he wasn't able to include my Hatchet Man run animation. That was kind of a relief for both of us - getting the weights perfect on the mesh so that the legs didn't intersect was tedious and mostly ineffective. Matt said he needed a wood-chopping animation, so I gave him this:

                           

SPOILERS:
The way I rigged the legs (poorly, that is) means the feet go absolutely crazy with any hip movement (let alone leg movement) - I told Matt he should hide the feet. The audience will never know!

I'm also quite glad I added that extra bone for the axe head. I knew that would come in handy!