Kilan Larsen
Sprint 5
The first thing that I did this week was I took the main bridge model that my team created and reduced the polygon count to create an LOD version of the model for Unity.
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I used a combination of the reduce tool and the vertex merge tool to remove all bevels from rectangular geometry, and I manually reduced each of the cylinders to be as simple as possible.
LOD0: 15256 Tris
LOD1: 3492 Tris
After that, I began looking into ways to add custom foliage such as grass and trees into the scene. A bit of digging on the internet led me to the SpeedTree Engine, which is an industry standard tool for both game and movie studios to easily create highly customized, detailed, and optimized foliage. SpeedTree allows you to export your foliage directly into Unity and Unreal and creates multiple LOD levels as well as wind effects so that the trees and grass blow in the wind realistically. The only downside is that this is yet another tool that we'd need to pay for, at a cost of $20 per month for indie devs/students like ourselves.
It's worth noting that the Unity Standard Asset Pack and Gaia both come equipped with a few trees from SpeedTree, so we were actually seeing and using their assets without even realizing it!
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This is the standard palm tree asset from SpeedTree that comes in the Standard Asset pack, and I populated it across a test scene with Gaia. It has a very high quality right out of the box, so I'm looking forward to seeing what we could do custom with the tool.
I also decided to make some minor improvements to the UI. Firstly I created a back button for the pause screen mirroring the one from Apex Legends. I then fixed the volume sliders in the settings menu so that they scale better with the decibels slider of the AudioMixer.
*Apex Legends Pause Screen *My Pause Screen
The last thing that I changed was I commented out some code on the character that was causing it to act unnaturally on steep slopes and potentially clip through the landscape. I then made some more adjustments to the impact landing effect and called it good for this sprint.
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For the next sprint I will be taking some time off from the project to work on a game jam. If we end up needing extra time to work on the project I will be more than willing to work on it over the week long holiday break.