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Creating Game Environments in Maya and Photoshop
Creating Game Environments in Maya and Photoshop
This course is a practical guide to constructing 3D buildings that can be used to populate video game environments. Author Adam Crespi starts with a gas station taken from a photograph—retrieving measurements and dimensions with modular blocking and planning techniques in Adobe Photoshop—and then re-creates the building in Maya with polygonal modeling and advanced texturing techniques. The course shows how to model elements such as walls, doors, and roofs, including stacking UVs on a texture sheet, and also sheds light on simulating real-world details like dirt, wear, and grime, using ambient occlusion and normal baking in a high- to low-poly workflow. The final chapter shows how to export the model to the Unity gaming engine for final cleanup and rendering.
Topics include: .Analyzing concept art for contours, texture, and shadow detail .Blocking out the basic form of a building .Modeling modular elements .Planning for occlusion and texture stacking .Creating the low-poly-count elements .Planning a texture sheet .Stacking UVs .Transferring maps .Baking occlusion and normal maps .Drawing detail at the right size .Painting layers of dirt and wear .Adding lights and refining materials