Kilan Larsen
Sprint 4
The core of my work this week was spent creating a fully functional settings menu in the style of Apex Legends. This didn't take as long as expected, and is extremely helpful when working on different computers as we can now adjust the quality settings to as high as the computer can handle without lagging. For example, at home I will have maxed out quality, but on my laptop I will turn off volumetric lighting and post processing so the game runs smoother.
Settings Menu Demo:
I also made sure that the entire pause menu and settings menu UI was packaged into one prefab so that it is a simple drag and drop to place it in other scenes. It will need some small adjustments, but overall I'm quite satisfied with the result, so I decided to move on and work on other things for the remainder of the sprint.
I decided to work on 3D modeling a pickup item for the collectibles next. I starting by getting some reference for the design from the 3D models in Apex Legends. I found this 'loot box' robot, and decided to base my pickup from it.
I cut the legs out the design, and made a rather simple model in Maya, and then proceeded to reduce the polygon count for two other versions. These will be set up for LOD (Level of Detail) in Unity so that the further you are from the model the lower the quality appears to save resources.
Here's the final result of the pickup in Unity (untextured). I also applied a very basic spin to it via a C# script.
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I did UV map the model so that it can be textured, but I plan on leaving the texturing to another team member so that the texture map can be combined with other models to reduce the number of materials used in the project.
The last thing that I did this week was play around with lighting a shader settings to see what will work best for our project moving forward. I found that moving the project to the Lightweight Render Pipeline (LWRP) would be good since it will allow us to use Shader Graph, but it is sadly incompatible with Aura 2's volumetric lighting and it makes the existing shaders that come with Gaia basically worthless. I'm still unclear on which decision will be best moving forward.
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I also found that switching the default lighting mode in the project settings from 'gamma' to 'linear' makes a huge improvement on the look of the lighting in the scene, and is more natural. You can see the difference in lighting quality below:
*Gaia landscape with gamma lighting *Gaia landscape with linear lighting:
For Sprint 5 I'm not entirely sure yet what I will be working on, but I definitely want to look into creating swaying grass and trees without the use of shader graph. If I am unable to accomplish this is a way that looks good, I will look into moving the project over to the LWRP.