This week I was inspired by this 3D artist that I follow on instagram: m0.studio. They do a lot of abstract 3D compositions with fun colors and textures and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for this week’s homework to try my hand at it with a bunch of weird ones. I’m pretty happy with the output.
I actually have very little experience with Unity! This is my first real time doing anything in it and it’s been pretty smooth so far with the basic stuff. I’ve done a lot of research this week leading up to the proposal and I have maybe 20 new things bookmarked to watch later.
As for process, I went and grabbed all my textures from Free PBR and started loading them into their own materials in Unity. I played around with the normal map values for each material here and adjusted the intensity of the skybox lighting so that the dark materials could be seen just a bit better. (Definitely need to work on lighting in general though!) I grabbed 2 blobby models off Sketchfab and did 2 myself in Blender. The rest of the objects in the diorama are just Unity primitives. I quickly realized though that the Sketchfab UVs were not right, so I assigned materials to them that wouldn’t exaggerate the faults too much, like metal.
I did have to spend quite a bit of time on the emissive materials trying to get them to actually render out as emissive materials. I have the lava material set to be emissive but the effects are super subtle. I made 3 regular old solid color materials with just the emissive setting checked because I wanted to see them actually affect other objects in the space. I also wanted to use post processing so I could get more real time lighting effects but I couldn’t quite get to where I could use bloom. I settled for a baked lightmap instead, which did the job.
Overall I found this intro week really beneficial for me to just get into Unity and make something super simple and start becoming familiar with all the shortcuts and UI. I just hope the jump from this to my final project goes smoothly!
Citations:
3D Models (Sketchfab) – Blobject | Clouds Blobs
HDR (Poly Haven) – Sunflowers Sky
Textures (Free PBR) – Misc