Summation #8 - 3D Game Environments: Create Professional 3D Game Worlds

The book 3D Game Environments: Create Professional 3D Game Worlds in an in depth look at creating a game world based in game engines such as UDK or Steam. Although it does not direct go into importing objects or actors into these engines, it does show you how to prep textures, models, and other assets that you would later put into your overall environment. The main focus of the book is divided into different parts of the production pipeline. The beginning of the book focuses on understanding the uses of scene optimization. Scene optimization is making the best use of all assets, textures, effects, and other additives in your environment for each pieces overall use. For instance if I have a small cup in a kitchen scene and want to texture it, I would be best using a smaller size texture map since the player will never able to seen an extreme amount of detail in a small cup. The same goes for the geometry of the cup, I would keep it very limited in polygonal count in order to optimize the cup to run fastest in the scene while still maintain the overall quality of the scene. In the reverse direction, if I were creating a large space ship that has crashed on a planet, I could use a larger amount of geometry and maybe even use wider array of texture maps due to the fact that based on player scale the textures would be quite visible if they were low resolution and it would impact the overall look and feel of the environment.
As the book goes on it goes into great detail explaining making texture maps and the ways to go about adding noise variants to a map. This is don’t through specific overlays and blending textures through Photoshop or other image editing software to give the most believable texture you could give to your assets. By adding variants to your textures through overlays and blending you are able to avoid repeating patterns and bland texture samples.
Toward the end of the book the author talks more about a specific environment that he created for the purposes of the book and go through a step by step process of creating that environment. The scene depicts a jungle base with a front gate into the complex. By using the techniques shown in the previous chapter he shows the proper way to model all of the assets and then goes about setting up proper UVs. UVs are the spacial coordinates used to assign textures to each face on a polygonal object. Then he textures the scene and final renders the scene in Maya to show a mock up of how it would look in game.
Works Cited
Ahearn, Luke. 3D Game Environments: Create Professional 3D Game Worlds. Amsterdam: Focal/Elsevier, 2008. Print.